[Grml] Read-only root fs

[s. keeling]

Incoming from T:

Caveat:  I'm not grml.  :-)

> - 2nd, an OT question. Does Debian or grml support some kind of integrity
> test? My current situation is that after so many damn power failures, my
> lovely Debian is in an unstable stage, commands that used to work are now
> failing mystically. Re-install the packages that contain those tools won't
> help. I'm now forced to do a reinstallation after having my
> ever-upgrading-and-customizing Debian for so many years... 

*Every* Linux I've used (since 1993) has always been able to notice on
boot whether the system had been shut down gracefully (filesystems
unmounted and marked "clean"), or if the system had crashed.  In the
latter case, if / is dirty, it comes up in single user, expects you
(or itself) to run fsck, then reboots with a clean / and continues to
check the rest of the filesystems.

In thirteen years running ext2, I've never found it incapable of
recovering completely, and I've had some flakey hardware let me tell
you!

> I wish Debian or grml has the integrity testing capability that rpm has,
> ie. to test whether the libs/executables that reside on the disk are still

I run a md5sum once a week, saving the output to file.  Doing a diff
on that file against the previous week's shows me anything that's
changed.  You're welcome to the script if you'd like it.  It's 36
lines of perl (plus copious comments).


-- 
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
(*)    http://www.spots.ab.ca/~keeling      Please don't Cc: me.
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