Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On 24/04/2013 17:22, Tanstaafl wrote: On 2013-04-24 6:27 AM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: Here's my pair of MTAs: $ uptime 12:24PM up 1295 days, 13:10, 1 user, load averages: 0.19, 0.20, 0.31 $ uptime 12:24PM up 1925 days, 20:30, 4 users, load averages: 0.90, 0.75, 0.84 Those two just keep on accepting and dealing with mail, they do that a million times a day and according to uptime have been doing it for 10 years. ? Looks like 3.5 years and 5.2 years, respectively... You seriously haven't upgraded your kernel on those machines for 3.5/5.2 years?? Yes, something like that. Politics get involved. But please let's not go there - the pain is too much to bear :-) -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On 24/04/2013 16:21, Neil Bothwick wrote: -- Neil Bothwick I have seen things you lusers would not believe. I've seen Sun monitors on fire off the side of the multimedia lab. I've seen NTU lights glitter in the dark near the Mail Gate. All these things will be lost in time, like the root partition last week. Time to die. ^^^ Completely OT of course, but this fortune just totally made my day :-) -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On 24/04/2013 17:22, Tanstaafl wrote: On 2013-04-24 6:27 AM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: Here's my pair of MTAs: $ uptime 12:24PM up 1295 days, 13:10, 1 user, load averages: 0.19, 0.20, 0.31 $ uptime 12:24PM up 1925 days, 20:30, 4 users, load averages: 0.90, 0.75, 0.84 Those two just keep on accepting and dealing with mail, they do that a million times a day and according to uptime have been doing it for 10 years. ? Looks like 3.5 years and 5.2 years, respectively... You seriously haven't upgraded your kernel on those machines for 3.5/5.2 years?? Yes, something like that. Politics get involved. But please let's not go there - the pain is too much to bear :-) -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com Alan. I wouldn't want to be present when those do get shut down. I wonder if the disks would spin back up as the bearings might have deteriorated by now... -- Joost -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On 25/04/2013 09:55, J. Roeleveld wrote: Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On 24/04/2013 17:22, Tanstaafl wrote: On 2013-04-24 6:27 AM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: Here's my pair of MTAs: $ uptime 12:24PM up 1295 days, 13:10, 1 user, load averages: 0.19, 0.20, 0.31 $ uptime 12:24PM up 1925 days, 20:30, 4 users, load averages: 0.90, 0.75, 0.84 Those two just keep on accepting and dealing with mail, they do that a million times a day and according to uptime have been doing it for 10 years. ? Looks like 3.5 years and 5.2 years, respectively... You seriously haven't upgraded your kernel on those machines for 3.5/5.2 years?? Yes, something like that. Politics get involved. But please let's not go there - the pain is too much to bear :-) -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com Alan. I wouldn't want to be present when those do get shut down. I wonder if the disks would spin back up as the bearings might have deteriorated by now... Bingo. You correctly assessed the main technical risk. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On 2013-04-25 3:47 AM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: On 24/04/2013 17:22, Tanstaafl wrote: You seriously haven't upgraded your kernel on those machines for 3.5/5.2 years?? Yes, something like that. Politics get involved. But please let's not go there - the pain is too much to bear :-) Lol! I feel your pain. I have had experiences with phb's that think like that. Thankfully my current one just leaves those decisions to me, with the caveat that if things break, he gets to yell at me proportionally to the downtime...
Re: [Bulk] Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
Therefore Ext2 is a perfect match: * it is so old, that I guess by now most bugs have been found and squashed; * it is so old, that virtually any Linux (or Windows, FreeBSD, or most other knows OS's) are able to at least read it; * it is so old, that by now I bet there are countless recovery tools; * it is so simple (compared with others), that someone could just re-implement a reader for it, or recovery tools; Any feedback about the Ext2 for backups? (Hope I'm not wrong on this one...) Unexpectedly ext4 is actually rather good for embedded when compared to JFS etc.. However I have been considering using ext2 on my home partitions for the very reason you guess upon (it is easily recoverable by testdisk rather than carving out inodes, in fact ext4 was known to have this issue but traded it for other benefits when it was designed). I will have to look into the performance differences but thinking about it now as my IO is usually net or usb then I can't see it being relevant. -- ___ 'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface' (Doug McIlroy) ___
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On 23/04/2013 23:10, Jarry wrote: On 23-Apr-13 22:40, Alan McKinnon wrote: ext4 is fine. All the horror stories ended years ago and almost all major distros ship it as a default. Hm, I remember one horror story about ext4 data corruption bug which circulated in public just a few months ago: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/23/690 Jarry I dimly recall that one. Didn't it happen only in some very obscure circumstances that rarely happens in real life? Like rapidly mounting and unmounting the filesystem in a very specific use-scenario? What I do recall clearly is my conclusion at the time that the bug was just that - a bug. All software has bugs and not all bugs are equal; one has to learn to categorize them, and this one was relatively minor as far as filesystem bugs go. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 01:22:37 -0400, Walter Dnes wrote: I have mix of various sizes. The best feature about ReiserFS is that it doesn't do inodes, so I don't have to be psychic about my future file mix when I format the partition. For that reason alone, I'm tempted to stay with ReiserFS3. I'm aware of the booby traps... - *NEVER EVER* have an uncompressed ReiserFS image on a ReiserFS partition - avoid Postfix and Qmail Why? I ask because I have a mail server with reiserfs on the mail spool, it's been running for several years and behaved impeccably, but if there is a good reason to switch, I will. -- Neil Bothwick X-Modem- A device on the losing end of an encounter with lightning. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On Tue, 23 Apr 2013 21:37:52 -0400, Philip Webb wrote: I've used ReiserFS3 for years with no problems, but I keep hearing horror stories about it. I haven't read any horror stories re Reiser 3 , Where have you been f0r the last ten years? A quick search of this list's archives will reveal several. My understanding is that BTRFS and EXT4 are still a bit bleeding edge. My impression is that Btrfs is a bit unstable, but Ext4 is usable. I haven't used either. SUSE are using btrfs in SLES, so it can't be that experimental or unstable any more. -- Neil Bothwick A real programmer never documents his code. It was hard to make, it should be hard to read signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 11:39 PM, Hilco Wijbenga hilco.wijbe...@gmail.com wrote: [...] So when I needed to install a new machine, I looked around and settled on JFS. This box has been running for about half a year now (so that includes several power failures) without any problems. I certainly am very pleased with JFS so perhaps you might want to consider it. I've also used (and still use) JFS on a lot of partitions (LVM actually), from my laptops (both rotating and SSD), desktop, VM's, etc. I've moved to it a few years ago after getting tired of all the Ext3 fsck's. Although JFS is quite efficient, and didn't create too much trouble --- never lost an entire file-system, never corrupted data, etc. --- it does have a few quirks: * empty files after panics --- I think in this regard it's not JFS's fault, but actually badly written software, because things go like this: say you edit a file, save it, and immediately (a few seconds) get either a panic or power failure, the result is an empty file; the technical details are like this: some software first truncate the file, write to it, and close it, but don't sync the data, thus you end up with an empty file; as said I think JFS is correct here, because you don't get a mix of old and new data, etc.; however I've encountered this behavior in quite a few instances... * no TRIM support --- obviously really useful on SSD and virtualized disks; (although I remember there was some work done in this respect;) * not enough tooling --- you get only the `jfs-utils`, and that's kind of it... * small community --- if you have a question, you can use the mailing list, it's quite responsive, but there aren't many data-points so that you can easily find someone in a similar situation, thus with a solution... All in all, I've started gradually migrating my partitions on Ext4. I stay away for Btrfs for now. And to be frank I don't quite like Btrfs's, and ZFS's for that matter, approach of throwing together all the layers, from the file-system, to the RAID, to the block management, etc. I find the layered approach more appealing --- as in if something goes wrong you can poke around --- of having completely separated block device management (LVM), RAID (MD), and file-system. A... and for backup file-systems, I use Ext2. Why? My take on this is: * I don't need write or read performance; I don't mind long fsck's; (thus any file-system could fit in here, however see below;) * I do really need reliability and, most importantly, recovery in case s**t... Therefore Ext2 is a perfect match: * it is so old, that I guess by now most bugs have been found and squashed; * it is so old, that virtually any Linux (or Windows, FreeBSD, or most other knows OS's) are able to at least read it; * it is so old, that by now I bet there are countless recovery tools; * it is so simple (compared with others), that someone could just re-implement a reader for it, or recovery tools; Any feedback about the Ext2 for backups? (Hope I'm not wrong on this one...) Ciprian.
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On 24/04/2013 10:27, Ciprian Dorin Craciun wrote: I stay away for Btrfs for now. And to be frank I don't quite like Btrfs's, and ZFS's for that matter, approach of throwing together all the layers, from the file-system, to the RAID, to the block management, etc. I find the layered approach more appealing --- as in if something goes wrong you can poke around --- of having completely separated block device management (LVM), RAID (MD), and file-system. For me, this is the whole attraction of ZFS and btrfs. I've just had to deal with 7 storage layers for so long I am now tired of it. I completely understand why LVM is designed the way it is - a PV, VG and LV are three distinct things handled differently and the code is compartmentalized out to reflect that. What I am so tired of is exposing that complexity in the interface so I have to be aware of it all the time. And partitions - don't get me started on that. A classic disk partition is something Bill Gates made popular for DOS and it should have died a long long time ago. Why the blazes do we STILL have this concept of a partition table, physical partitions, extended partitions. gr. Here's what I want from storage systems: I chuck a bunch of disks into a pool and inform the system how they must be used - maybe I want a certain RAID level, maybe the very fast SSD is reserved for a specific purpose. Then I want to tell the system how much storage I want for what purpose. If Joe Blow is to get 20G of storage for his ~, I want to tell the system there is a thing called joeb and it has a hard quota of 20G. The software must then go and do all the magic, because I am tired of doing the magic myself. ZFS is almost a sysadmin's wet dream come true - there's is no such thing as a filesystem as such, there are only chunks of storage with a purpose and characteristics. The concept of partitions goes away, there are only block devices. A volume is sort of a cross between a filesystem and a directory with the benefits of each (and few of the downsides). I suppose the main attraction can be summed up thusly: ZFS lets me stop being the human in a place where a computer belongs :-) -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On 04/24/2013 10:26:52 AM, Neil Bothwick wrote: SUSE are using btrfs in SLES, so it can't be that experimental or unstable any more. That depends on the version of the kernel in use. I remember having lost all data of a btrfs file system with an early 3.x kernel. Meanwhile there have been quite a lot of patches to btrfs. With the more recent kernels (= 3.6 I believe) this hasn't happened any more. I'd recommend kernel 3.8.x, at least (I'm running 3.9_rc7) I remember that only last week, /sbin/btrfsck --repair DEVICE failed with some spurious error on a btrfs file system which happily turned out to be just OK. Note, that I emerge the GIT sources of btrfs-progs whenever I install a new kernel (each week in the last 7 weeks). So, as of now, I wouldn't rely on btrfsck doing a good job. But my btrfs file systems survived quite a few power losses without the need to btrfsck them. Helmut.
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On 24/04/2013 10:24, Neil Bothwick wrote: On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 01:22:37 -0400, Walter Dnes wrote: I have mix of various sizes. The best feature about ReiserFS is that it doesn't do inodes, so I don't have to be psychic about my future file mix when I format the partition. For that reason alone, I'm tempted to stay with ReiserFS3. I'm aware of the booby traps... - *NEVER EVER* have an uncompressed ReiserFS image on a ReiserFS partition - avoid Postfix and Qmail Why? I ask because I have a mail server with reiserfs on the mail spool, it's been running for several years and behaved impeccably, but if there is a good reason to switch, I will. It's one of those maybe-it-is, maybe-it-isn't scenarios. Wiki has a pretty accurate description of the scene wrt mail spools: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReiserFS#Criticism Personally, I dunno. Yes, it could be an issue but it's not one I've actually seen rear it's head. I suspect Walter has an unfair opinion tainted my a few personal bad experiences (but that can happen with any system and software). His first statement though is very good advice. Never store a reiser image on a feiser fs, and never use reiser in a VM on a host fs that is also reiser. The reason is what happens when you try fsck it - reiser metadata (unlike ext*) is not all in fixed pre-determined locations on disk, so fsck can employ heuristics to go and look for it's metadata. If it finds it's own metadata and also the metadata in the stored image, it can't tell them apart. The results of that are not pretty. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 11:00:06 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: - avoid Postfix and Qmail Why? I ask because I have a mail server with reiserfs on the mail spool, it's been running for several years and behaved impeccably, but if there is a good reason to switch, I will. It's one of those maybe-it-is, maybe-it-isn't scenarios. Wiki has a pretty accurate description of the scene wrt mail spools: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReiserFS#Criticism Some directory operations (including unlink(2)) are not synchronous on ReiserFS, which can result in data corruption with applications relying heavily on file-based locks (such as mail transfer agents qmail[9] and Postfix[10]) if the machine halts before it has synchronized the disk. So I can lose stuff if the computer crashes. I don't see that as a specific problem with MTAs. although they do tend to have a lot of file throughput. On the other hand, I think the fact that maildir uses so many files is one of the reasons I went with ResierFS in the first place, running out of inodes on a mail server would not be my idea of fun. His first statement though is very good advice. Never store a reiser image on a feiser fs, and never use reiser in a VM on a host fs that is also reiser. The reason is what happens when you try fsck it - reiser metadata (unlike ext*) is not all in fixed pre-determined locations on disk, so fsck can employ heuristics to go and look for it's metadata. If it finds it's own metadata and also the metadata in the stored image, it can't tell them apart. The results of that are not pretty. Absolutely, I have no dispute with that - nor with the MTA statement I just hasn't heard that one before. -- Neil Bothwick RAM disk is *not* an installation procedure. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 10:50:11 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: Then I want to tell the system how much storage I want for what purpose. If Joe Blow is to get 20G of storage for his ~, I want to tell the system there is a thing called joeb and it has a hard quota of 20G. The software must then go and do all the magic, because I am tired of doing the magic myself. It's a shame there appears to be no equivalent of a soft quota in ZFS. Maybe it is the use of the term quota that is misleading, when in reality it is more akin to volume size. I suppose the main attraction can be summed up thusly: ZFS lets me stop being the human in a place where a computer belongs :-) +1 on all but the quota thing. -- Neil Bothwick Mouse: (n.) an input device used by management to force computer users to keep at least a part of their desks clean. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
130424 Neil Bothwick wrote: 130423 Philip Webb hadn't read any horror stories re Reiser 3 : Where have you been for the last ten years? Reading this list various Linux news sites. A quick search of this list's archives will reveal several. If it's so easy, please point me to a couple (smile). The only one mentioned in this thread so far is a strange case of trying to use a RF image on a RF, which most users will never have any occasion to encounter. -- ,, SUPPORT ___//___, Philip Webb ELECTRIC /] [] [] [] [] []| Cities Centre, University of Toronto TRANSIT`-O--O---' purslowatchassdotutorontodotca
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk wrote: On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 10:50:11 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: Then I want to tell the system how much storage I want for what purpose. If Joe Blow is to get 20G of storage for his ~, I want to tell the system there is a thing called joeb and it has a hard quota of 20G. The software must then go and do all the magic, because I am tired of doing the magic myself. It's a shame there appears to be no equivalent of a soft quota in ZFS. Maybe it is the use of the term quota that is misleading, when in reality it is more akin to volume size. The quota concept in ZFS ist just different... While Linux just uses the Melbourne Quota code that has been written for *BSD, zfs uses a new concept that fits the constraints of a COW filesystem with writable snapshots. ZFS may on the other side may allow to write much more than in the limitation data as the quota is checked only when a sync() happens (which is aprox. every 3 seconds). Jörg -- EMail:jo...@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin j...@cs.tu-berlin.de(uni) joerg.schill...@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On 24/04/2013 11:27, Neil Bothwick wrote: On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 10:50:11 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: Then I want to tell the system how much storage I want for what purpose. If Joe Blow is to get 20G of storage for his ~, I want to tell the system there is a thing called joeb and it has a hard quota of 20G. The software must then go and do all the magic, because I am tired of doing the magic myself. It's a shame there appears to be no equivalent of a soft quota in ZFS. Maybe it is the use of the term quota that is misleading, when in reality it is more akin to volume size. quota is this context is indeed a misleading term. Volume size so far fits my needs just fine, but that's because I've never needed quotas as such. I find quotas too inflexible anyway, it's a case of forcing a simplistic hardware rule into the human space and that never really solves the problem properly. The problem quotas try to solve is don't let users use more than their fair share of stuff; all the kids must play nicely on the playground I suppose the main attraction can be summed up thusly: ZFS lets me stop being the human in a place where a computer belongs :-) +1 on all but the quota thing. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On 24/04/2013 11:21, Neil Bothwick wrote: On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 11:00:06 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: - avoid Postfix and Qmail Why? I ask because I have a mail server with reiserfs on the mail spool, it's been running for several years and behaved impeccably, but if there is a good reason to switch, I will. It's one of those maybe-it-is, maybe-it-isn't scenarios. Wiki has a pretty accurate description of the scene wrt mail spools: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReiserFS#Criticism Some directory operations (including unlink(2)) are not synchronous on ReiserFS, which can result in data corruption with applications relying heavily on file-based locks (such as mail transfer agents qmail[9] and Postfix[10]) if the machine halts before it has synchronized the disk. So I can lose stuff if the computer crashes. I don't see that as a specific problem with MTAs. although they do tend to have a lot of file throughput. On the other hand, I think the fact that maildir uses so many files is one of the reasons I went with ResierFS in the first place, running out of inodes on a mail server would not be my idea of fun. I solve that problem for me in the obvious way: I pay less attention to choice of filesystem and more attention on rigging systems that don't crash! Admittedly, I have the luxury of being able to do that, I don't work for Google (who need an entirely different approach due to scale) -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 12:08:12 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: It's a shame there appears to be no equivalent of a soft quota in ZFS. Maybe it is the use of the term quota that is misleading, when in reality it is more akin to volume size. quota is this context is indeed a misleading term. Volume size so far fits my needs just fine, but that's because I've never needed quotas as such. I find quotas too inflexible anyway, it's a case of forcing a simplistic hardware rule into the human space and that never really solves the problem properly. Sometimes a simplistic rule is what's needed. If you are selling off-site storage in 1GB chunks, you need to stop people using more than they have paid for. Hard quotas do this, soft quotas let you warn them first, before things get broken. The problem quotas try to solve is don't let users use more than their fair share of stuff; all the kids must play nicely on the playground That sounds reasonable to me. -- Neil Bothwick ISDN: It Still Does Nothing signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 12:10:56 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: Some directory operations (including unlink(2)) are not synchronous on ReiserFS, which can result in data corruption with applications relying heavily on file-based locks (such as mail transfer agents qmail[9] and Postfix[10]) if the machine halts before it has synchronized the disk. So I can lose stuff if the computer crashes. I don't see that as a specific problem with MTAs. although they do tend to have a lot of file throughput. On the other hand, I think the fact that maildir uses so many files is one of the reasons I went with ResierFS in the first place, running out of inodes on a mail server would not be my idea of fun. I solve that problem for me in the obvious way: I pay less attention to choice of filesystem and more attention on rigging systems that don't crash! Maybe that's why I never hit this bug, I don't recall my mail server ever crashing. If this mail does not arrive intact, I spoke too so^%£$£ -- Neil Bothwick OPERATOR ERROR: Nyah, Nyah, Nyah, Nyah, Nyah! signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On 24/04/2013 11:37, Philip Webb wrote: 130424 Neil Bothwick wrote: 130423 Philip Webb hadn't read any horror stories re Reiser 3 : Where have you been for the last ten years? Reading this list various Linux news sites. A quick search of this list's archives will reveal several. If it's so easy, please point me to a couple (smile). The only one mentioned in this thread so far is a strange case of trying to use a RF image on a RF, which most users will never have any occasion to encounter. It /used to be/ rare. But ever since vmware-workstation has been around and available to Linux users, it has become a much more serious issue at large, and you need to be aware of it. It's one of those issues that is not immediately obvious, where overlooking it is not a classic screwup and where it can bite you hard if you are not careful. We can't blame any of the software for this, it's just a side effect of the way things are nowadays -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On 24/04/2013 12:17, Neil Bothwick wrote: On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 12:10:56 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: Some directory operations (including unlink(2)) are not synchronous on ReiserFS, which can result in data corruption with applications relying heavily on file-based locks (such as mail transfer agents qmail[9] and Postfix[10]) if the machine halts before it has synchronized the disk. So I can lose stuff if the computer crashes. I don't see that as a specific problem with MTAs. although they do tend to have a lot of file throughput. On the other hand, I think the fact that maildir uses so many files is one of the reasons I went with ResierFS in the first place, running out of inodes on a mail server would not be my idea of fun. I solve that problem for me in the obvious way: I pay less attention to choice of filesystem and more attention on rigging systems that don't crash! Maybe that's why I never hit this bug, I don't recall my mail server ever crashing. If this mail does not arrive intact, I spoke too so^%£$£ Postfix doesn't crash (for the everyday human definition of doesn't). Here's my pair of MTAs: $ uptime 12:24PM up 1295 days, 13:10, 1 user, load averages: 0.19, 0.20, 0.31 $ uptime 12:24PM up 1925 days, 20:30, 4 users, load averages: 0.90, 0.75, 0.84 Those two just keep on accepting and dealing with mail, they do that a million times a day and according to uptime have been doing it for 10 years. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On 2013-04-24 1:22 AM, Walter Dnes waltd...@waltdnes.org wrote: - avoid Postfix and Qmail Eh??? Been running postfix/courier-imap and now dovecot for 8+ years on reiserfs with zarro problems... including a few scary moments after 2 unclean shutdown events due to extended power outage and the UPS not sending the shutdown signal in time (false battery level readings due to aging batteries), but it came back up fine... So no idea where you got the idea that postfix+reiserfs was a no-no...
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 07:17:26 -0400, Philip Webb wrote: So I continue to believe that Reiser 3 is remarkably reliable, at least if you don't try running it virtually on itself or blame hardware problems on the software. I didn't say otherwise, in fact I've already posted to this thread about running a mail server on it for many years. But there have been plenty of horror stories posted to this list and elsewhere. How much store you place by them is up to you. -- Neil Bothwick I have seen things you lusers would not believe. I've seen Sun monitors on fire off the side of the multimedia lab. I've seen NTU lights glitter in the dark near the Mail Gate. All these things will be lost in time, like the root partition last week. Time to die. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On 2013-04-24 6:27 AM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: Here's my pair of MTAs: $ uptime 12:24PM up 1295 days, 13:10, 1 user, load averages: 0.19, 0.20, 0.31 $ uptime 12:24PM up 1925 days, 20:30, 4 users, load averages: 0.90, 0.75, 0.84 Those two just keep on accepting and dealing with mail, they do that a million times a day and according to uptime have been doing it for 10 years. ? Looks like 3.5 years and 5.2 years, respectively... You seriously haven't upgraded your kernel on those machines for 3.5/5.2 years??
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On 24 April 2013, at 11:16, Neil Bothwick wrote: ... Volume size so far fits my needs just fine, but that's because I've never needed quotas as such. I find quotas too inflexible anyway, it's a case of forcing a simplistic hardware rule into the human space and that never really solves the problem properly. Sometimes a simplistic rule is what's needed. If you are selling off-site storage in 1GB chunks, you need to stop people using more than they have paid for. Hard quotas do this, soft quotas let you warn them first, before things get broken. I'm unclear how this warning would be addressed. Your system must be more complex than I'm imagining, because I see this obvious answer of a bash script which loops through /home/*, runs `du` or `df` and sends an email to anyone who's consuming more than 90%. Obviously this needs to be adapted to circumstance. Stroller.
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
Am 24.04.2013 19:38, schrieb Stroller: On 24 April 2013, at 11:16, Neil Bothwick wrote: ... Volume size so far fits my needs just fine, but that's because I've never needed quotas as such. I find quotas too inflexible anyway, it's a case of forcing a simplistic hardware rule into the human space and that never really solves the problem properly. Sometimes a simplistic rule is what's needed. If you are selling off-site storage in 1GB chunks, you need to stop people using more than they have paid for. Hard quotas do this, soft quotas let you warn them first, before things get broken. I'm unclear how this warning would be addressed. Your system must be more complex than I'm imagining, because I see this obvious answer of a bash script which loops through /home/*, runs `du` or `df` and sends an email to anyone who's consuming more than 90%. Obviously this needs to be adapted to circumstance. That only works on small systems. I have systems here where a 'du' on /home would take hours and produce massive IO wait, because there's so much data in there. signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On 24 April 2013, at 18:53, Michael Hampicke wrote: ... Your system must be more complex than I'm imagining, because I see this obvious answer of a bash script which loops through /home/*, runs `du` or `df` and sends an email to anyone who's consuming more than 90%. Obviously this needs to be adapted to circumstance. That only works on small systems. I have systems here where a 'du' on /home would take hours and produce massive IO wait, because there's so much data in there. Of course. Excuse me. My original idea was in respect of the previous respondent's desire to offer hard limits of a gigabyte - allocating each user a partition and running `du`, which returns immediately, on it. I don't understand how a hard limit could be enforced if it's impractical to assess the size of used data. Stroller.
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 18:38:42 +0100, Stroller wrote: Sometimes a simplistic rule is what's needed. If you are selling off-site storage in 1GB chunks, you need to stop people using more than they have paid for. Hard quotas do this, soft quotas let you warn them first, before things get broken. I'm unclear how this warning would be addressed. Your system must be more complex than I'm imagining, because I see this obvious answer of a bash script which loops through /home/*, runs `du` or `df` and sends an email to anyone who's consuming more than 90%. Obviously this needs to be adapted to circumstance. The warnquota command, from sys-fs/quota, does this for all user and all filesystems with a single command called from cron. Yes, you could reinvent the wheel with a shell script, but the wheel already exists for filesystems other than ZFS. There's also the grace time element, which allows you to go over quota for a short period, allowing you, for example, to delete some old backups before the system fails on the new one. -- Neil Bothwick WITLAG: The delay between delivery and comprehension of a joke. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:07:05 +0100, Stroller wrote: That only works on small systems. I have systems here where a 'du' on /home would take hours and produce massive IO wait, because there's so much data in there. Of course. Excuse me. My original idea was in respect of the previous respondent's desire to offer hard limits of a gigabyte - allocating each user a partition and running `du`, which returns immediately, on it. I said by the gigabyte not of a gigabyte, a user could have hundreds of them. I don't understand how a hard limit could be enforced if it's impractical to assess the size of used data. Because the filesystem keeps track of the usage, just like it does for the whole filesystem, which is why df . is so much faster than du .. ZFS does this too, it just doesn't have a concept of a soft limit. -- Neil Bothwick Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On 24 April 2013, at 19:32, Neil Bothwick wrote: ... Your system must be more complex than I'm imagining, because I see this obvious answer of a bash script which loops through /home/*, runs `du` or `df` and sends an email to anyone who's consuming more than 90%. Obviously this needs to be adapted to circumstance. The warnquota command, from sys-fs/quota, does this for all user and all filesystems with a single command called from cron. Yes, you could reinvent the wheel with a shell script, but the wheel already exists for filesystems other than ZFS. I don't see how it's reinventing the wheel if the wheel doesn't fit your vehicle. Stroller.
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
Who's paying for this bandwith? N. On 4/24/13, Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk wrote: On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:07:05 +0100, Stroller wrote: That only works on small systems. I have systems here where a 'du' on /home would take hours and produce massive IO wait, because there's so much data in there. Of course. Excuse me. My original idea was in respect of the previous respondent's desire to offer hard limits of a gigabyte - allocating each user a partition and running `du`, which returns immediately, on it. I said by the gigabyte not of a gigabyte, a user could have hundreds of them. I don't understand how a hard limit could be enforced if it's impractical to assess the size of used data. Because the filesystem keeps track of the usage, just like it does for the whole filesystem, which is why df . is so much faster than du .. ZFS does this too, it just doesn't have a concept of a soft limit. -- Neil Bothwick Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:44:18 +0100, Stroller wrote: The warnquota command, from sys-fs/quota, does this for all user and all filesystems with a single command called from cron. Yes, you could reinvent the wheel with a shell script, but the wheel already exists for filesystems other than ZFS. I don't see how it's reinventing the wheel if the wheel doesn't fit your vehicle. That was my point, that the wheel doesn't fit. There are ways of kludging this in ZFS that do not involve the overhead of running du, such as parsing the output from zfs list, but nothing as convenient as the common method that exists for other filesystems. -- Neil Bothwick Windows Error #02: Multitasking attempted. System confused. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 14:45:21 -0400, Nick Khamis wrote: Who's paying for this bandwith? What bandwidth? We're discussing disk space usage. Unless you're referring to the bandwidth consumed by the discussion, which jumps massively every time someone quotes and reposts an entire email to add a one line comment. -- Neil Bothwick Three kinds of people: those who can count and those who can't. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 12:22:36PM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote On 24/04/2013 11:37, Philip Webb wrote: 130424 Neil Bothwick wrote: 130423 Philip Webb hadn't read any horror stories re Reiser 3 : Where have you been for the last ten years? Reading this list various Linux news sites. A quick search of this list's archives will reveal several. If it's so easy, please point me to a couple (smile). The only one mentioned in this thread so far is a strange case of trying to use a RF image on a RF, which most users will never have any occasion to encounter. It /used to be/ rare. But ever since vmware-workstation has been around and available to Linux users, it has become a much more serious issue at large, and you need to be aware of it. It's one of those issues that is not immediately obvious, where overlooking it is not a classic screwup and where it can bite you hard if you are not careful. We can't blame any of the software for this, it's just a side effect of the way things are nowadays I don't know if it's configurable somewhere, but I vaguely recall seeing an occasional bootup where I get a message about the system having gone more than X days without being fsck'd. So it helpfully does it for me automatically and then does a regular reboot. I don't know if it's for the 200 megabyte ext2 / or the huge ReiserFS3 /home partition. -- Walter Dnes waltd...@waltdnes.org I don't run desktop environments; I run useful applications
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:04:27 -0400, Walter Dnes wrote: I don't know if it's configurable somewhere, but I vaguely recall seeing an occasional bootup where I get a message about the system having gone more than X days without being fsck'd. So it helpfully does it for me automatically and then does a regular reboot. I don't know if it's for the 200 megabyte ext2 / or the huge ReiserFS3 /home partition. It's an ext* feature, you can set the time or number of mounts with tune2fs and view it with dumpe2fs -h /dev/sdXN | grep -i mount\ count -- Neil Bothwick Top Oxymorons Number 29: Soft rock signature.asc Description: PGP signature
[gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
I recently got a new Dell desktop PC at home, and ran Windows for a while to make sure nothing is broken. Now I'm getting ready to partition and reformat for a Gentoo install. My understanding is that BTRFS and EXT4 are still a bit bleeding edge. I've used ReiserFS3 for years with no problems, but I keep hearing horror stories about it. This will be my biggest main hard drive yet (1 terabyte), so I'm considering EXT3 for the main partition. Comments? -- Walter Dnes waltd...@waltdnes.org I don't run desktop environments; I run useful applications
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On Tue, 2013-04-23 at 14:40 -0400, Walter Dnes wrote: I recently got a new Dell desktop PC at home, and ran Windows for a while to make sure nothing is broken. Now I'm getting ready to partition and reformat for a Gentoo install. My understanding is that BTRFS and EXT4 are still a bit bleeding edge. I've used ReiserFS3 for years with no problems, but I keep hearing horror stories about it. This will be my biggest main hard drive yet (1 terabyte), so I'm considering EXT3 for the main partition. Comments? I think btrfs is definitely still considered experimental, but ext4 is considered stable by the kernel team, I believe. I've been using ext4 on many systems for a few years, and it's been fine. It has the advantage of having extents over ext3, as well as a few other performance improvements. -- Randy Barlow
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On 04/23/2013 02:40 PM, Walter Dnes wrote: I recently got a new Dell desktop PC at home, and ran Windows for a while to make sure nothing is broken. Now I'm getting ready to partition and reformat for a Gentoo install. My understanding is that BTRFS and EXT4 are still a bit bleeding edge. I've used ReiserFS3 for years with no problems, but I keep hearing horror stories about it. This will be my biggest main hard drive yet (1 terabyte), so I'm considering EXT3 for the main partition. Comments? ext3 has been stable for ages. That said, I've been using ext4 for the past 3-4 years on nearly all my systems without a problem. The only scenario I don't use ext4 is for /boot...and there I use ext3. BTRFS is marked as 'EXPERIMENTAL' in the kernel because they don't want you using it for production use. ext4 hasn't had that 'EXPERIMENTAL' flag for years. ext3, even longer. Incidentally, if you use ext3, and your kernel supports ext4, chances are it's the kernel's ext4 code that's handling your ext3 fs. I don't even bother compiling in ext2 and ext3. signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
Walter Dnes wrote: I recently got a new Dell desktop PC at home, and ran Windows for a while to make sure nothing is broken. Now I'm getting ready to partition and reformat for a Gentoo install. My understanding is that BTRFS and EXT4 are still a bit bleeding edge. I've used ReiserFS3 for years with no problems, but I keep hearing horror stories about it. This will be my biggest main hard drive yet (1 terabyte), so I'm considering EXT3 for the main partition. Comments? I use ext4 on about everything here. I have used ext3 a lot in the past but also have used reiserfs too with no problem back then. It seems reiserfs may not be getting as much TLC as it used to so when I built my new rig, I went to ext4. That was about 2 years or so ago. When it does fsck during boot up, it is really fast. Also, almost zero fragmentation. It comes with a defrag tool but not sure why they bothered really. I have a 3Tb drive using LVM and never a problem here with ext4. I also have a 750Gb and a few smaller drives too. Everything but / and /boot is on LVM. root@fireball / # mount rootfs on / type rootfs (rw) /dev/sda6 on / type ext4 (rw,commit=0) snip needless stuff /dev/sda1 on /boot type ext2 (rw) /dev/mapper/OS-usr on /usr type ext4 (rw,commit=0) /dev/mapper/OS-var on /var type ext4 (rw,commit=0) /dev/mapper/home-home on /home type ext4 (rw,commit=0) /dev/mapper/backup-backup on /backup type ext4 (rw,commit=0) tmpfs on /var/tmp/portage type tmpfs (rw,noatime) binfmt_misc on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw,nodev,noexec,nosuid) root@fireball / # While ext3 is good, I'd at least think about ext4. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
Am 23.04.2013 20:48, schrieb Michael Mol: That said, I've been using ext4 for the past 3-4 years on nearly all my systems without a problem. The only scenario I don't use ext4 is for /boot...and there I use ext3. really? I never tried that and still use ext2 there. No big difference at boot time, I assume ... even if it has to be checked, it's only 100 MB in size on my systems ... I don't even bother compiling in ext2 and ext3. gotta try that ;-) Stefan
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 02:48:19PM -0400, Michael Mol wrote Incidentally, if you use ext3, and your kernel supports ext4, chances are it's the kernel's ext4 code that's handling your ext3 fs. I don't even bother compiling in ext2 and ext3. Interesting. From make menuconfig... [ ] Use ext4 for ext2/ext3 file systems ...and the help text says... Allow the ext4 file system driver code to be used for ext2 or ext3 file system mounts. This allows users to reduce their compiled kernel size by using one file system driver for ext2, ext3, and ext4 file systems. I usually have a 200 or 250 MEGAbyte (correct!) / partition using ext2. /boot is physically on the / partitiion. The / partition only gets written to... * during the emerge install step * when I'm manually tweaking a file in /etc Then a swap partition, and the rest of the drive is a honking big /home partition. /home/bindmounts/opt and /home/bindmounts/var and /home/bindmounts/usr and /home/bindmounts/tmp are bind-mounted onto the corresponding directories in /. The big /home partition is the one that I'm considering EXT3 or EXT4. -- Walter Dnes waltd...@waltdnes.org I don't run desktop environments; I run useful applications
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On 23 April 2013 11:40, Walter Dnes waltd...@waltdnes.org wrote: I recently got a new Dell desktop PC at home, and ran Windows for a while to make sure nothing is broken. Now I'm getting ready to partition and reformat for a Gentoo install. My understanding is that BTRFS and EXT4 are still a bit bleeding edge. I've used ReiserFS3 for years with no problems, but I keep hearing horror stories about it. This will be my biggest main hard drive yet (1 terabyte), so I'm considering EXT3 for the main partition. Comments? I too have been using ReiserFS for years without problems. It must have gotten close to 10 years. This is with power failures every couple of months and of course the occasional PEBKAC. Whenever I needed to install something on a VM I would try some other filesystem. Usually Ext3 as that was supposed to be really good. It never worked well for me, I would always run out of inodes. AFAIK, Ext4 does not have dynamic inode allocation either. For me, that means they don't make the short list. Still, ReiserFS is showing its age and I do get the impression that it's not getting much dev love any more. So when I needed to install a new machine, I looked around and settled on JFS. This box has been running for about half a year now (so that includes several power failures) without any problems. I certainly am very pleased with JFS so perhaps you might want to consider it.
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On 23/04/2013 20:40, Walter Dnes wrote: I recently got a new Dell desktop PC at home, and ran Windows for a while to make sure nothing is broken. Now I'm getting ready to partition and reformat for a Gentoo install. My understanding is that BTRFS and EXT4 are still a bit bleeding edge. I've used ReiserFS3 for years with no problems, but I keep hearing horror stories about it. This will be my biggest main hard drive yet (1 terabyte), so I'm considering EXT3 for the main partition. Comments? In over 10 years, I have never had a file system failure with any of these (all used a lot): ext2 ext3 ext4 zfs reiser3 I have had failures with these (used a lot): Oh wait, there aren't any of those. What I'm saying is that unless you do something bat shit crazy insane you are rather unlikely to have to deal with filesystem issues. Hardware issues are MUCH more common. Don't use btrfs just yet, it's not production-ready and the on-disk format is liable to change. ext4 is fine. All the horror stories ended years ago and almost all major distros ship it as a default. reiser is unsupported and liable to bitrot if it isn't already. p.s. you will hear horror stories about any filesystem you care to list. All you need do is find just one idiot that did something stupid once and wreaked his fs, and suddenly it's the software's fault. But every time we discuss filesystems here the vast majority of users of a certain type state they never had any issues with it. Me too :-) -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On 23-Apr-13 22:40, Alan McKinnon wrote: ext4 is fine. All the horror stories ended years ago and almost all major distros ship it as a default. Hm, I remember one horror story about ext4 data corruption bug which circulated in public just a few months ago: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/23/690 Jarry -- ___ This mailbox accepts e-mails only from selected mailing-lists! Everything else is considered to be spam and therefore deleted.
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 4:10 PM, Jarry mr.ja...@gmail.com wrote: On 23-Apr-13 22:40, Alan McKinnon wrote: ext4 is fine. All the horror stories ended years ago and almost all major distros ship it as a default. Hm, I remember one horror story about ext4 data corruption bug which circulated in public just a few months ago: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/**23/690https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/23/690 Jarry Does anyone know if this ever was a production issue? Gentoo-sources is 6 versions behind http://packages.gentoo.org/package/sys-kernel/gentoo-sources for the stable kernel latest dev is 3.6.9-rc8
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 4:10 PM, Jarry mr.ja...@gmail.com wrote: On 23-Apr-13 22:40, Alan McKinnon wrote: ext4 is fine. All the horror stories ended years ago and almost all major distros ship it as a default. Hm, I remember one horror story about ext4 data corruption bug which circulated in public just a few months ago: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/10/23/690 AFAIR the widely-reported bug was actually limited to a very obscure circumstance using a certain non-default filesystem configuration and only 1 or 2 people were known to report corruption. And it was fixed in 3.6.6, I think. :)
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
I'll add my anecdotes :) On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:40 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: In over 10 years, I have never had a file system failure with any of these (all used a lot): ext2 ext3 ext4 zfs reiser3 ext2, ext3, ext4, btrfs here. ext4 for years (ever since it lost the dev suffix in the kernel) without a single hiccup, and btrfs on a laptop with no battery monitor, meaning the battery would die with no warning (unclean shutdowns x1000) and never had an issue that prevented it from mounting on the next reboot. Also have used btrfs on a mobile phone running Mer development snapshots which tends to crash, reboot, freeze and requires the battery pulled, also never failed to remount after that constant abuse. btrfs has some features similar to zfs, reiser, lvm, dm... I still haven't decided whether that feature-creep makes me think oh cool! or oh no! :) I have had failures with these (used a lot): Oh wait, there aren't any of those. JFS is on my never again list, I have used it on a few drives and two of them ended with catastrophic failure after an unexpected shutdown. journal replay failed is a phrase I still see in my nightmares... The recovery stripped names from inodes resulting in millions of files like I01039130.RCN or something like that... not sorted into directories or anything, though the timestamps survived, strangely. It has been several years since then and I've avoided JFS ever since. I actually had a third JFS incident, but by then I had disabled auto-fsck. I was unable to mount it read-only, but found a shareware tool for OS/2 that was able to recover files from a corrupt JFS volume, complete with filenames and directories. I slapped the drive into an OS/2 machine and it took several DAYS to complete the recovery, but it did in fact complete and I happily sent the guy ten dollars. It looks like nowadays there is an open-source tool for linux called jfsrec which does the same kind of recovery from broken JFS volumes. I used XFS on a drive which had a bad cable, and it wound up being unmountable and unfixable by fsck, though (after replacing the cable) I was able to do read-only dump all of the files from it using the xfs utils, after which I reformatted and copied everything back. Can't fault the filesystem for a bad cable but any time fsck is unable to fix an unmountable filesystem, it scares me. So, for me the rule of thumb is: ext4 on important drives (servers, my main desktop system, RAID array, backups), and btrfs on drives where I'm more willing to experiment and take a chance at something weird happening (laptop, web surfing workstation, mobile phone, virtual machines).
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On 24/04/13 06:34, Paul Hartman wrote: I'll add my anecdotes :) On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 3:40 PM, Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com wrote: In over 10 years, I have never had a file system failure with any of these (all used a lot): ext2 ext3 ext4 zfs reiser3 ext2, ext3, ext4, btrfs here. ext4 for years (ever since it lost the dev suffix in the kernel) I find filesystems are very much a case of YMMV :) I will NOT use an ext fs again willingly - lost too many whole systems, corruption - Ive had less problems with DOS! Reiserfs, has had its moments but is by far the most stable system, though NTFS isnt bad these days either. btrfs - I am using this for backups systems and under a cephfs rbd store for VM's. Not bad ... but definitely not stable though its months since I have lost a whole system ... I am also using it as the primary file system on an apple macbook air (ssd) and for the OS on an ssd for a vm server host and its been problem free on both. BillK
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
William Kenworthy wrote: I find filesystems are very much a case of YMMV :) I will NOT use an ext fs again willingly - lost too many whole systems, corruption - Ive had less problems with DOS! Reiserfs, has had its moments but is by far the most stable system, though NTFS isnt bad these days either. btrfs - I am using this for backups systems and under a cephfs rbd store for VM's. Not bad ... but definitely not stable though its months since I have lost a whole system ... I am also using it as the primary file system on an apple macbook air (ssd) and for the OS on an ssd for a vm server host and its been problem free on both. BillK I think Alan said it best but I just can't resist sharing this: http://blogs.computerworld.com/15413/the_best_linux_file_system_of_all That is about Google switching all their servers to . . . . ext4. This is like asking which brand of hard drive is best. No matter who it is, every single person has had at least one drive fail and will never use that brand again. lol Just for giggles. Dale :-) :-) -- I am only responsible for what I said ... Not for what you understood or how you interpreted my words!
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
130423 Walter Dnes wrote: I recently got a new Dell desktop PC at home Now I'm getting ready to partition and reformat for a Gentoo install. I've used ReiserFS3 for years with no problems, but I keep hearing horror stories about it. I haven't read any horror stories re Reiser 3 , which I've been using for 10 years without any problem ever. Reiser 4 was stalling even before its creator's legal problems seems unlikely to get kernel support, but Reiser 3 is still being developed is probably simply mature. This will be my biggest main hard drive yet (1 terabyte), so I'm considering EXT3 for the main partition. Reiser is supposed to be good for large numbers of small files, so partly it will depend on just what you plan to use the space for. My understanding is that BTRFS and EXT4 are still a bit bleeding edge. My impression is that Btrfs is a bit unstable, but Ext4 is usable. I haven't used either. -- ,, SUPPORT ___//___, Philip Webb ELECTRIC /] [] [] [] [] []| Cities Centre, University of Toronto TRANSIT`-O--O---' purslowatchassdotutorontodotca
Re: [gentoo-user] How reliable is ext3?
On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 09:37:52PM -0400, Philip Webb wrote I haven't read any horror stories re Reiser 3 , which I've been using for 10 years without any problem ever. Reiser 4 was stalling even before its creator's legal problems seems unlikely to get kernel support, but Reiser 3 is still being developed is probably simply mature. This will be my biggest main hard drive yet (1 terabyte), so I'm considering EXT3 for the main partition. Reiser is supposed to be good for large numbers of small files, so partly it will depend on just what you plan to use the space for. I have mix of various sizes. The best feature about ReiserFS is that it doesn't do inodes, so I don't have to be psychic about my future file mix when I format the partition. For that reason alone, I'm tempted to stay with ReiserFS3. I'm aware of the booby traps... - *NEVER EVER* have an uncompressed ReiserFS image on a ReiserFS partition - avoid Postfix and Qmail And I expect it to continue running OK. -- Walter Dnes waltd...@waltdnes.org I don't run desktop environments; I run useful applications
