A couple of our servers have gone down for emergency maintence, but they don't startup cleanly.

e2fsck runs and waits for a 'y' response to 'fix errors' question - which we have to login via lish to fix. This also happens when we shutdown/boot, or clone a server and boot.

My Questions are;
1. is this normal behaviour?
2. can I change something to stop this from happening?
3. can I run e2fsck non-interactively on startup so it automatically comes back up?

How did you shut your machines down? If they weren't properly shut down, then yes, filesystem corruption can result, and you'll need to fsck on boot. It also runs every 30 boots for a checkup, IIRC. You can stop fsck from running, but you don't want to.

As for the non-interactive question, boot-time fscks *are* non-interactive on a typical distro... If you're seeing prompts on boot, either you've changed something, or your distro of choice is doing something stupid. In order to override this, you can edit whichever boot script runs fsck on boot; this varies from distro to distro. You can find out which files need to be modified by grepping through /etc/init.d most likely. You'll need to add the non-interactive parameter to fsck commandline in those scripts.

Our machines were shutdown for emergency maintenance by linode - in the middle of the night without warning and were down until we got in in the morning - as we have international clients they were not happy(!)

We use cent OS, setup by someone else, who I suspect didn't notice this when he did it - he is gone and now I gotta find some quick fix so if this happens again our servers actually come back up.

Thanks for the e2fsck info - I suspected this but wasn't exactly sure I was on the right track.

Geez- open a support ticket. If Linode caused it, they will certainly take care of it.

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Chris Bryant