< LPI Linux Certification

Detailed Objective

Weight: 4

Description:
Candidates should be able to properly maintain a Linux filesystem using system utilities. This objective includes manipulating standard filesystems.

  • Key knowledge area(s):
    • Tools and utilities to manipulate and ext2 and ext3
    • Tools and utilities to manipulate reiserfs (V3 and V4)
  • The following is a partial list of the used files, terms and utilities:
    • fsck (fsck.ext2, fsck.reiserfs)
    • badblocks
    • mkfs (mkfs.ext2, mkfs.reiserfs)
    • dumpe2fs
    • debugfs, debugreiserfs
    • tune2fs, reiserfstune

Formatting a partition

Before you format a partition you need to choose the right filesystem for your needs. The most common filesystem on linux is ext3 which is a journaled filesystem based on ext2. To format a partition with a filesystem you need to use the mkfs.* commands

 #ext3
 mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda1
 #fat
 mkfs.vfat /dev/hda1
 #xfs 
 mkfs.xfs /dev/hda1
 #reiserfs
 mkfs.reiserfs /dev/hda1

to create an ext2/ext3 filesystem you can also use the mke2fs utility

#ext2
mke2fs /dev/hda1
#ext3
mke2fs -j /dev/hda1

Configuring and repair filesystem

tune2fs it's an utility used to tune ext2/ext3 filesystem

#add the journal to an ext2 filesystem(convert from ext2 to ext3)
tune2fs -j /dev/hda1
#set the max mount count before the filesystem is checked for errors to 30
tune2fs -c 30 /dev/hda1 
#set the max time before the filesystem is checked for errors to 10 days
tune2fs -i 10d /dev/hda1

you can also tune a reiserfs partition using reiserfstune

#create a new journal for /dev/hda1 into /dev/hda2 
reiserfstune --journal-new-device /dev/hda2 -f /dev/hda1

to check a filesystem for errors you can use fsck.*

 #ext3
 fsck.ext3 /dev/hda1
 #fat
 fsck.vfat /dev/hda1
 #xfs 
 fsck.xfs /dev/hda1
 #reiserfs
 fsck.reiserfs /dev/hda1

you can also just run fsck /dev/hda1 directly and it will detect the filesystem


Exercises

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