Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 3092
rc.system runs fsck on mounted filesystems.
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:50 EDT
This be a case of "doctor, it hurs when i do this? but... IF you run /etc/rc.d/rc.system when the system is already booted it runs fsck over the filesystems from /etc/fstab without warning even if they are arleady mounted. It correctly detects that / is mounted and prompts before checking this but before doing the remaining filesystems it blanks out /etc/mtab. This means that it no longer knows about the pre-existing mounts. I'd imagine this could also have a detrimental effect apon anything mounted by an initrd boot or similar but I've not acutally tried this. Is there some reason for blanking out /etc/mtab I'm not aware of? /proc/mounts has the information we want so why not use it to rebuild a complete mtab file instead of just / and /proc. M. ------- Email Received From matthew@pasdex.com.au 05/27/99 11:11 -------
I hope you mean the rc.sysinit script and not rc.system which does not exist at least not in a stock install of Red Hat. Most of the damaging commands or devices that rc.sysinit run can only be run by root anyway. Normal users would not be able to do any damage and would only see alot of error messages. Now root on the other hand could run the script by accident but I can think of a lot of other ways root could damage the system also. I will that the rc.sysinit script should not have world execute permissions but it will have to stay executable and available by root for the boot up to work correctly.