[clue-tech] intentionally induce ext3 filesystem errors for testing recovery procedure?

[Maxwell Spangler]

On Tue, 2010-04-20 at 23:49 -0600, Jim Ockers wrote:

> I think I've got most of the logic figured out for how this needs to
> work.  But I need to induce moderate filesystem corruption so I can
> test all of the cases.  A google search made me think nobody has ever
> wanted to intentionally corrupt a filesystem.  Do any of you have any
> suggestions for what I could do?  Obviously I can dd garbage over the
> superblocks, but I think that will just make fsck exit 4.
> 
> Probably I will just wind up setting the variable in the script and
> not actually corrupting the filesystem. :(  But I was hoping to do
> end-to-end testing under real conditions...

I think if you email Ted T'so and ask him nicely he'd give you good
advice.  He wrote ext2utils/ext3/ext4 and if anyone is going to have
something that would generate errors for fsck testing, it'd be him.  Or
email one of the top level Linux filesystem related mailing lists to
find some of his partners.

What a fascinating question, I can't recall any recipes for screwing
things up on purpose.

-- 
Maxwell Spangler
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        Linux, Unix and Database Administration
        Currently: Boulder, Colorado
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