Re: [gentoo-user] A little light relief from endless problems

[Peter Humphrey]

On Monday 02 March 2009 07:09:31 Momesso Andrea wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 01, 2009 at 02:03:28PM -0500, Allan Gottlieb wrote:
> > At Sun, 01 Mar 2009 17:49:36 +0100 KH <gentoo-user@××××××××××××××××.de>
wrote:
> > > Peter Humphrey schrieb:
> > >> As it's Sunday, here's an odd little thing.
> > >>
> > >> Not long ago, while booting this machine, four ext3 partitions
> > >> needed checks on remount count reaching zero. They had been set to
> > >> 23, 24, 25 and 26 mounts. (I didn't choose the numbers; they were
> > >> allocated at the time I was creating the file system.)
> > >>
> > >> Now, this box does get rebooted, but hardly 23 x 24 x 25 x 26 =
> > >> 358,800 times all told. At, say, two reboots per day, that would
> > >> take rather a long time: a little under 500 years if my arithmetic
> > >> is working.
> > >
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > this is incorrect. 179400 mounts would be enough (24 and 26 can both
> > > be divided by 2).

I wasn't sure how to allow for this common factor, so I ignored it. Thanks 
for the clarification. And no, 250 years is not a lot more credible than 
500! So you might say my error was not significant.

> > Correct.  I erred in saying that 23,24,25,26 are relatively prime as
> > you noted.  In general if it was a1,a2,...an the answer would be
> > LCM(a1,a2,...,an), where LCM abbreviates Least Common Multiple.
> >
> > allan

Nicely  put.

> What about battery? If that's a laptop checks are deferred if running on
> battery at boot time, so it can happen that all the partitions are
> fscked the first time you boot on AC.

It isn't a laptop. It's an ordinary desktop box (or a workstation, depending 
on your point of view: it was sold as a workstation - and it certainly 
makes enough noise for one).

And the other contribution, about manual mounting, is also a red herring. If 
anyone thinks I contributed a hundred thousand operations to the total, 
they need to spend a little time in a quiet room  :-)

-- 
Rgds
Peter