How to skip fsck after reboot

With the recent Ghost Vulnerability out in the wild, I was tasked with patching our development servers and needed to reboot them in the middle of the night.  8 servers went down and came up within a minute, but 1 server took long than I would have hoped.  After getting worried that something had gone wrong, I reached out the our hosting provider and had them investigate.  My hunch was right, an FSCK was being ran on reboot, causing it to take much longer for the respective services to come back up.

I went out searching for a way to skip running an FSCK for future launches so that I wouldn’t be faced with this sort of issue again (although running an FSCK is definitely a good idea from time to time, there are definitely times you simply want the server to go down and come back up ASAP.

To skip an FSCK, do the following from the command line

touch /fastboot
init 6

This will make sure the server reboots in the quickest way possible.