The Gfs2 Withdraw Function - Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 5 - GLOBAL FILE SYSTEM 2 Manual

Chapter 3. Managing GFS2
reload)
$0 start
;;
*)
echo $"Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart|reload|status}"
exit 1
esac
exit 0

3.14. The GFS2 Withdraw Function

The GF2S withdraw function is a data integrity feature of GFS2 file systems in a cluster. If the GFS2
kernel module detects an inconsistency in a GFS2 file system following an I/O operation, the file
system becomes unavailable to the cluster. The I/O operation stops and the system waits for further
I/O operations to error out, preventing further damage. When this occurs, you can stop any other
services or applications manually, after which you can reboot and remount the GFS2 file system to
replay the journals. If the problem persists, you can unmount the file system from all nodes in the
cluster and perform file system recovery with the fsck.gfs2 command. The GFS withdraw function
is less severe than a kernel panic, which would cause another node to fence the node.
If your system is configured with the the gfs2 startup script enabled and the GFS2 file system is
included in the /etc/fstab file, the GFS2 file system will be remounted when you reboot. If the
GFS2 file system withdrew because of perceived file system corruption, it is recommended that you
run the fsck.gfs2 command before remounting the file system. In this case, in order to prevent your
file system from remounting at boot time, you can perform the following procedure:
1. Temporarily disable the startup script on the affected node with the following command:
# chkconfig gfs2 off
2. Reboot the affected node, starting the cluster software. The GFS2 file system will not be mounted.
3. Unmount the file system from every node in the cluster.
4. Run the fsck.gfs2 on the file system from one node only to ensure there is no file system
corruption.
5. Re-enable the startup script on the affected node by running the following command:
# chkconfig gfs2 on
6. Remount the GFS2 file system from all nodes in the cluster.
An example of an inconsistency that would yield a GFS2 withdraw is an incorrect block count. When
the GFS kernel deletes a file from a file system, it systematically removes all the data and metadata
blocks associated with that file. When it is done, it checks the block count. If the block count is not
one (meaning all that is left is the disk inode itself), that indicates a file system inconsistency since the
block count did not match the list of blocks found.
You can override the GFS2 withdraw function by mounting the file system with the -o
errors=panic option specified. When this option is specified, any errors that would normally
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