Remote Filesystem Administration

[Todd Cole]

Newbie question,   I have a Debian machine that is only accessible remotely via SSH (no keyboard or monitor attached).  In order to perform filesystem maintenance with e2fsck, I believe I need to put the machine into single-user mode, but with SSH running.  (Currently when I try to run e2fsck in run level 2 I receive messages that the “device is busy.”)   It would seem that the best way to do this would be to remove the K20ssh script from /etc/rc1.d and replace it with the S20ssh script from run level 2.  When I tried this, however, I still lost my ssh connection and had to (shutter) reboot the machine via power-cycle.   Can someone give me a hand and tell me what they are doing that accomplishes this safely?   Thanks in advance, Todd