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Which Partition Types Are Superior?
digitalmonkey2k1 writes: "I am currently planning on running an Apache web server and a small ftp on my pc. There are so many file systems that Linux can support now that I'm not certain what ones should be used for certain features. If anyone knows of a comparison list between them, somthing to give a pro/con method of deciding the best sort of configuration It would be greatly appreciated."
It's never failed me! But if you want some sort of insurance, give ext3 a try. it's pretty schweet.
Just DON'T even think about vfat or NTFS!
I'm done with sigs. Sigs are lame.
Therefore partition type is quite different from what file system to use.
Besides, wasn't there just a story on Linux Advanced File Systems????
There is no reason why use shouldn't use ReiserFS. Performs just as well (for the most part) as ext2 and will improve uptime by eliminating nasty fscks in the event of a failure.
The more interesting question probably is what kernel should you be using????
Kudos to story posters for having so many dups today. Really keeping us on our toes huh?
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
Which filesystems to use for Linux is becoming far too big of a deal here on Slashdot. Can't we consider it a FAQ and let people do their own research?
If you're looking to set up a small Apache and FTP for your friends, the short answer is probably: WHO CARES.
Ext2 will be more than sufficient, and if you feel like it just download the latest Redhat (7.2) and get Ext3 default for free. It probably won't make much difference to you for this task unless you're in an area powered by thousands of gerbils on wheels who happen to get tired at the same time.
XFS, ReiserFS, JFS or EXT3. Get a journaled FS. The reason is that as long as your system is up and running, having a fs like ext2 is no problem. But if you ever have crashes, long fsck (that something fail) means downtime. And for production servers, this is definitely something to avoid. :)) .
XFS and ReiserFS are the more mature fs IMHO (on Linux) . I run EXT3 on systems that were previously running EXT2, because it's easy to upgrade. But I had some troubles with EXT3 not so long ago (corrupted files during a compilation, not even after a crash) .
ReiserFS is the best if you have a lot of small files. Both for performance and space. XFS is believed to be better for large files.
Also, if you need performance, FS is one thing, but software is another thing. Apache is probably the slowest web server out there (although very powerful (altough less than Roxen and Caudium
Running Zeus, Tux or (for static content) WebFS will give you a huge performance increase, even on a slow filesystem.
{{.sig}}
For Linux, I've got to say that with the right hardware (fast drives) any of the newer journaling filesystems would be excellent. Why?
1. Data protection - the journaling systems Reiserfs, Ext3, XFS; etc offer far better and faster recovery than Ext2 does
2. Configurable, though I've never found a need to do it, you can set the block sizes in Ext2 and 3 to optimize it for larger files or smaller ones
What to stay away from fat/vfat/fat32. Why?
1. No security, period
*clink, clink* just my two cents..
3000 dead over past 2 years, still no free Palestinians, still
I can't address your question directly, but don't forget that things like block size can have just as large an effect on file system performance as the vhoice of FS itself.
I would use ReiserFS, it has always worked good for me.
The best part is the journalling, if your machine with a 50 gig drive loses power and reboots, you do not have to go through a lengthy fsck, this would greatly decrease the boot time of your server.
DOS-type partitions are the most common on PCs, the most expected, and the easiest to deal with.
Ext3 is basically ext2 with journalling. It performs better than Ext2, though. In a pinch you can always mount it as ext2.
You're not running anything exotic. Stick with the standards.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I like Reiserfs the best. That's to say: it is fast, is a journal filesystem and it's fast.
/usr/local/mp3 resides on a partition that seems to have some errors on the disk. I lost several mp3s before I realized that the disk was screwed up. Nope, you don't get any early warnings from reiserfs.
As to reliability: if you've got good hardware, there shouldn't be any troubles at all. I for one, don't have good hardware.
Their repair tools suck, by the way.
So why do I keep using it? It's fast, is suse's default filesystem and it's fast.
Which editor is better, vi or Emacs?
How is Linux better than Windows?
Why should I choose Linux over *BSD?
(For the humour impaired: it's a joke, goddamit, and not a very good one at that).
Which is the best car?
Who is the best actor?
Where is the best place to live?
None of these questions can be answered without saying "It depends" and neither can yours. Very rarely is anything better than everything else is every single way.
I use it for the document root of my webservers. It offers faster access to the files themselves, while having very good fault tolerance.
I serve very few dynamic documents - I'm getting alot of milage out of small machines. My sites have a deep directory structure, with fairly few files in each. ReiserFS shines for this layout.
I tested several different FS for this application, ReiserFS won for me.
Oh yeah, the other benefit is the relative ease of install and upgrade.
If you are going to choose a Journalized FS, check out the benchmarks and see which ones best suit your need. For example if you need little writing, but lots of read access (eg, data warehouse)... or if you need lots of servlets constantly accessing/updating data... or if it is a simple web server... you should look at which Journalized FS is best for you via a look at the benchmarks/home pages for the appropriate FS.
I personally use Reiser FS on my "home surfing/programming" machine... because of the extensive support (especially in certain distros).
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG
83! It's easy to remember, simple, and comes default in 100% of linux distributions.
Of course, there are those who are type 82 bigots. I can see how that's important, but with RAM prices so low these days....
Matt
me@mzi.to
Just use ext2 in the readonly mode, remounting it to rw whenever you have to make changes. If a system crashes with an ext2 filesystem mounted read only, it will be clean. Further more it is more secure, people can not change your system withou loggin in. And if you need people to be able to write to certain directories, have filesystems mounted rw to those directories.
/home/ftp/ ext2 ro,defaults 1 1
/home/ftp/upload ext2 defaults 1 1
A sample fstab:
/dev/sdc1 / ext2 defaults 1 1
/dev/sdc2
/dev/sdc1
etc
If you are running a big server with mad power you probably want ReiserFS. If you are running anything else you probably want ext3. You wont notice any difference between the two unless you are running a very large powerful web server with many visitors, like slashdot here. For you, just about any file system on the list will work.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I used ext2 about a year or so ago. I didn't mind the fscks (I only had a 4 GB drive) but 2 times it didn't work and I had to maunally fix some files. Then I got reiserfs and to this day I have had no troubles (short of a tree rebuild every few months just to improve speed).
I did have a vfat drive (40 GB) that had a whole bunch of stuff from a when I used windows (98 SE then 2000 then XP) then I reinstalled and used it as a secondary drive. Worked for a few months until the partition table became corrupt, NOrton couldn't fix it and well here I am. (It is now a 40 GB reiser fs partition.)
Secondsun
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
Best of all, you can fully utilize it under Linux as well as Windows 2000, so if you feel like you would be better off with developing under Windows, you wouldn't have to reformat your whole disk and lose data in the process. Benchmarks have consistently shown that it is an enterprise-class performer.
Finally, you have to consider reliability in decisions such as these. NTFS just doesn't lose data, which is more than we can say of such "lossy" systems such as ReiserFS. Frankly, I can't even see why people put such "journaling" systems on production machines. All in all, you can't go wrong with NTFS.
Is your company running tools written by ma
Whats wrong with google? Surely it is more appropriate to search for this kind of thing, instead of making it into another askslashdot.
The XFS command line utilities seem to be less effective than the Bestbits patches & utils, and the Samba 2.2.1a support seems to be a bit off with its handling of recursive descents and inheritance. To be fair on both counts, I'm still learning the file system, and the problems could be all mine.
I'd thought about ReiserFS, but I really need those ACLs.
Just some thoughts. Any errors are all mine. Please feel free to correct. I have no pride.
"Laugh Quietly- tomorrow is your turn to be rong."
This FS doesn't fragment file around partition space, major advantage if you install in hardware RAID. Fragmentation is a big problem for performance, so if it doesn't happen you have a good access time. I use ReiserFS on SuSE and Mandrake, it is fast/good, doesn't loose data and I tried the journaling by shutdonw bad my isntallation many times before a fresh install, never lost a single file, this amazed me since I dilike the fschk everytime maximal mount count and a forced unmounted FS situation happened.
Try ReiserFS. Too bad RedHat 7.2 decide not to support ReiserFS, I will give up - with regreat - on RedHat.
PC partition tables are a pile of crap, legacy crap going back 20 years, we only need LBA support and nothing else.
Whats the go with 4 primary partitions, the nextended partitions, some OS's primary partitions have to overlap extended partitions, some they done, some you can only use 1 primary partition, some you can use them all.
And having to reserve the whole first track, usually 32 sectors, just to put in about 170 bytes of data... what a waste.
The extra space can be used by other disk externder type programs, but there is no standard way to reserve it or anything, its first in best dressed, use it at your own risk.
And look at what it has to do, it just has to mark the start and end of a section of raw disk space, how difficult is it ?
The format has just been butchered too much by too many people. But for practical reasons we are stuck with PC partition tables because of convenience for the masses.
You could do a raw LVM partition.
I like Acorn partition types (if thats the one im thinking of), nice and simple, only what you need.
i heard that reiser fs handles small sized files better than all the other current fs's .. small in size and large in number i mean.. good for webservers. where u get hundreds of under under 5k files ..
The question asked for information about partitition schema, not file systems. And yet almost every post so far has been about file systems.
h andbook/install-steps.html
/opt, /etc/, /usr/local, and so on, the BSD system is very rigid--there's even a man page about where things belong.)
n ual/ref-guide/ch-partitions.html
/.'s main page: The FreeBSD handbook (first link above) was just (48 hours ago) released in its second edition. This is a significant documentation change, and all the daemons are celebrating. Join us!
IMHO, if you want a superior partition scheme, you should not use the linux system, which is identical in structure to the Microsoft DOS system. Instead, read about the BSD partition (and slice) system. See section 2.5.2 of the (new) 2d edition handbook:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/
In BSD, the Microsoft-Linux concept of partitions is preserved as "slices" that exist to hold collections of files systems. (In FreeBSD, you can man hier(8) to read more about this. Unlike linux, where every vendor puts things in
Another option in BSD is the use of what are called "dangerously dedicated" system where the entire disk becomes one slides, with no other partition. Read more about this in the handbook. There's even information about working with different flavors of partition types.
I suppose to give 'equal time' we should give a link to the Microsoft/Linux partition scheme, so here one is:
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-7-Ma
FYI-- here's some news you won't see on
I'm running apache and ftp right now, and average traffic is about 20 hits per day. At this order of magnitude, or anywhere near it, it really doesn't matter.
Ceci n'est pas une sig
chattr +a
Of course, it has 1 big draw back, its not merged with Linus's kernel. That should be happening soon, I hope.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
Just DON'T even think about vfat or NTFS!
Perhaps you meant using an NTFS fs under Linux, however if not: What's your problem with NTFS? NTFS 4 and NTFS 5 are very feature laden, impressive filesystems, so I'm curious what your problem with them is, apart from perhaps that they're from Microsoft.
the partitions that are 6 ft. or taller with sound proofing so the music I play does not disturb my other coworkers.
(heh, there is one in every crowd...and yes, that is me they are talking about)
Ok, go a head and mod this down as funny.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Just a few days ago,
1 22 5&mode=nested
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/162
appeared. And the "debate" over file systems has been going on and on. The article I cited above is recent and perhaps not as relevant, but I think a lot of people who wrote replies were both sensible and informative when it came to the merits of the two most available journaling systems for Linux (as is the case with this debate. I don't see a whole lot of chilish flaming.)
mwtr / THIS SIG HAS BEEN PRAYED OVER AND MAY BE USED AS A POINT OF CONTACT (ACTS 19:12)
Someone you trust is one of us.
If we take the "partition" word by it's definition, a hard drive partition would be a way to separate the hard drive into one or more distinct parts. Now, those parts aren't called "partitions"; they are part of the hard drive partition scheme if you like. But we often refer to those parts as partitions which is wrong: a hard drive can be partitionned in only one way at any given time.
My question is how then should we call those "parts" ?
Now to answer the filesystem question I would suggest using ReiserFS. I used it for a couple of months with good results and without any problem. It works well also on software raid1...
delete free(system.gc);
i run a few basic web/ftp servers that get about 1000 hits a day. they run slackware 8.0 with ext2 filesystems. however, if you are expecting a short number of hits, it really doesnt matter what filesystem you use, more it depends on what distribution and what software you are using.
The dog got loose on my computer, and now there's XP all over the screen. -Paul www.ploeb.net
if it's a small server (i'm assuming under 5000 page views a day) It won't matter what you go with unless your running off a 486. I'd say just go with one that journals for crash recovery, but if it's a small server you won't notice much of a speed difference
Photos.
My fstab looks something like this (nonrelevant parts snipped) /glftpd/site ext3
/dev/hda3 / ext3
/dev/hda2 swap swap
/dev/hdb1
/dev/hda1/ / tmp reiserfs
There is probably a reason for the distribution you are installing having a certain filesystem as default :)
> It still corrupts data.
Yes and No. I've been using it for ages. Never had a problem until Mandrake 8.0. What a disaster. I'm back using it again with 8.1 (am thinking about going back to rh, though) and still like the speed. No problem so far. but my total confidence in it is somewhat shaken. Since 1995, I had no problems with linux until 8.0, where I have lost 2 IBM drives, and seperatly, a corrupted partition.
I work on graphic drivers for Linux, which unfortunatly leads to a lot of system freezes. But i recently changed to ext3 and it has been a major time saver.
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
Partitons and file systems are different. It does not matter waht the partition type is; it is still an array of 512 byte sectors.
I personly like JFFS. Open source available from IBM. I also like JFFS in conjunction with LVM. LVM is awesome. Its snapshot feature is very useful in backing up active systems.
Jamey Kirby
heh.
/. is also a reflection on my sense of humor.
When CmdrTaco said humor was subjective, it does not mean you subject posters to your lack of humor and mod them down.
Sometimes humor means straying offtopic, oh, the horror of it all. (hint: dripping with sarcasm...seeing as humor escapes most ppl, sarcasm is damn near stealth mode).
(sigh)
"there is a limit on my sig, and I don't char, there is a limit on my sig and I don't char...."
Time to switch to plan b. Make a new account because I seem to be mistaken for an AC, My nic on
Yeah, I'm tenacious, yeah, I'm off topic, yeah, my humor is esoteric, yeah I'm posting anon.
Wandering back on topic, some moderators are not using a JFS...so (watch out here comes the funny part if you are not humor impaired) GO FSCK YOURSELF.
Heh, a little venting, I feel better now.
Laughter is the best medicine, slashdot moderators are the disease.
Like the line from Aliens "Did I.Q's just drop suddenly?!". Slowly I start to realise this is a retorical question on slashdot.
I give up, you win.
I currently have an ext2 / partition, with ReiserFS as my /home partition. I'm considering upgrading to the newest -ac kernel, compiling in ext3 support, and converting my ext2 partition to ext3.
Does anybody know of any problems with running both journaling filesystem types at the same time?
Notice how that is no longer an option in the later 4.X series?
It 'was' dangerous....if you did any kind of CVSup and rebuilt your kernel, things like top would stop working. SCSI drives formatted on DPT RAID cards would boot with an error on Adaptec cards, and a upgrade from 3.x to 4.x would break.
If you ran in a non-dedicated mode, rebuilds had no effect. Same with the SCSI issue.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
I noticed another poster mentioned partitioning schemes vs. file systems... It certainly is a good point to bring up and one that is relevant to the file system used.
:^)
I personally think the default partitioning schemes used by most Linux distros suck. BSD clearly has an advantage because of the strict standard. It's also better because it's more strict and (IM*NTBC*HO) logical in the standards for the placement of files.
Depending on the size of your HD, the space required by the hosted data, the required reliability/resilience/uptime, the partitioning and filesystem schems could vary drastically. For a newbie, it's best to begin with the default anyway, but I'd reccommend looking into alternatives anyhow.
BTW, no offense intended, but I'm assuming the poster is a newbie simply by the nature of the question asked. I was once a newbie too... ahhhh, the good old days of innocence and discovery, and getting flamed by the wannabe gurus with ego problems...
I'm done with sigs. Sigs are lame.
I like FAT because reiserfs and ext are for wusses who actually want to read data from the partition after they've written it. This is why, although my linux root partition is ext2 (yes, still), all of my important files are on a FAT32 partition.
OK, to be honest it's because Stupidity 98 doesn't read ext partitions. I would like to use something better. In fact, I want a filesystem that recovers better from crashes than ext2, so I might consider changing at some point. Still, I like FAT16 for sheer nostalgia value. And NTFS still gets me sometimes. Just... go gently with it.
http://www.doublezero.uklinux.net/
Doublezero: like Slashdot, only less useful.
Is there any stable crypto filesystem for Linux?
I found a "CFS", but the version was just for kernel 2.2.x. I didn't find a 2.4 port.
SuSE 7.3 ads say it has a "CryptoFS". Does it work well? Where can I get it, if I don't want to install SuSE?
An easy-to-use crypto fs would be enormously important especially for laptops in corporate world. I think W2k or XP have some kind of encryption options, and if Linux can't provide a good alternative, it may be a problem in more paranoid companies.
Of normal filesystems, I've found ReiserFS stable on my two machines during my 6 months of use. I converted from ext2 after it corrupted mysteriously. Unfortunately, RH still doesn't support ReiserFS, even optionally, which I think is really silly. SuSE and Mandrake do.
GO OUTSIDE. Get a life. Stop wasting your time with useless bullshit that can so easily be taken away from you. Maybe put your money into some useful cause.
How can 70%+ of the world be wrong?
Look at all the features... long file names, abbreviated file names, many allocation sizes, and backwards compatibility all the way to 1981 if you want!
What, it doesn't support any kind of access control, you say? You don't need it anyway. After all, it's always nice when anyone at your computer can remove any file they want, like some random libraries from the system folder.
With the backing of an "innovative" industry giant like Microsoft, VFAT is surely the filesystem choice of the future!
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Ummm, why Linux? If you go Linux, make sure you have this weeks latest and greatest kernel or else, someone will r00t your boxen (hopefully you know about all those security holes in that last few years, that Alan/Linus never told anyone about) so update with tomorrow's kernel, and the day after, and, the day after... etc.. etc.. or else behold in the insecurities of Linux, or simply go OpenBSD if you want REAL security!
Anybody else here ever completely kill a Windows 2000 system by upgrading a disk from basic to dynamic?
:)
I had two different systems completely crap out on me during the interval between 'You must reboot your POS Windows Box for Changes To Take Effect', and the inevitable "No Boot Partition Found - System Halted"
One system I recovered, the other was a complete loss. Emergency Disks, Repair Installs, Parallel Installs, etc all claimed the disks were simply 'damaged'. Disk sector editors were about the only useful tools when I was done.
All this, so that the OS would allow me to mirror a few volumes...
n/t
this troll cracks me up every time i've seen it. and i must have read it about a million times.
Consider the range 0x00-0xFF (inclusive). Randomly pick a number in that range. Set that to your file system and get amazing results.
/. the past couple days.
/.'s front page! Easily answered if someone would simply visit a documentation resource and RTFM.
/. community. I'm installing WindowsXP on my server where I'm serving Samba and web pages for my friends. The installation program asked me if I want to use FAT or NTFS. WHICH ONE DO I USE!? I'm so confused about what partition type to use! I hope the /. community can lend some insight!"
Really, this is getting pathetic. We've a few too many pointless and irrelevant (come on, a story based entirely off a screenshot?!), or hopelessly outdated subject matter into the on
Yes I am being a troll and I apologize, but I want to know why intelligent stories (maybe a couple that I've sent in) get rejected, and this nonsense gets posted in the main column. Get real! EVERY Linux distro I have EVER used starting with Slackware 3.0 has always recommended using ext2 as the Linux Default. (You'll notice certain partitioning utilities make this clear.) How can anyone disagree that this is a newbie Linux question? Posted on
The Ask Slashdot forum has traditionally seen questions that are difficult to answer and need expert advice. They usually lend some insight into a problem or ask questions many of may not have considered.
This guy just asked a question regarding Linux installation. What the hell? Next thing we'll see is an Ask Slashdot question with the following:
"Hi, I wanted to ask the
Go ahead and mod me down. I don't care, but I think there aughta be another voice expressing irritation at the reduced quality for a service that may become subscription in the near future (or drown us in ads). I don't think that's major news or anything someone in #linuxhelp on the Undernet couldn't have answered with a flood of flames.
Why bother.
#1 Uh, yea it does.
#2 So what?
#3 Do you really?
#4 This is bad??? How?
here's yet anther pitiful ask slashdot. these things are really lame aren't they. digitalmonkey2k1 is a fucking moron... prime example of slashsnot
It would really help if you actually read his question before answering.
I'll just reply to you, then I won't be replying to the original poster. Are we happy?
Have XFS on a few production boxes (well, getting ready for rollout !). Once I proved I could boot/recover from CD and do live backups / snapshots, the picture was complete. It has been debugged logically already.
. 0.1/installer/ Makes a nice complement to RHL 7.1. A few other distros also have support for XFS.
If the code would find its way into the main kernel source, it would make the choice easier. The Bootable CD iso image is available on ftp://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/download/Release-1
...just not as their default filesystem.
They have made improvements, and in my experience ext3 is faster than ext2. See for example the Michael Johnson email:
The answer to today's question is Type 83 of course.
Oh wait, are we talking about partition types or filesystems here?
<grub> Reading
Other problems with journaling file systems are that they are more complex, less mature, and have appeared only more recently in the Linux kernel, meaning there is a higher probability that they have some problem.
If you can't tolerate the few minutes of downtime resulting from an fsck, then a journaling file system is not going to help you either since machines become unavailable for lots of other reasons. In that case, you need network mirroring with a hot failover. Journaling file systems are more about convenience than any particularly rational engineering tradeoff.
Altogether, my recommendation is: don't pick software just because it's hot and new. For most users, ext2 with Apache makes a great web server platform. Apache is fast enough for any kind of Internet connection you are likely to have (Microsoft could probably serve all their static content from a single Apache server). If you like the convenience of a journaling file system and don't mind the performance hit, maybe you want to consider ReiserFS, which offers a lot of other useful features.
WinNT 3.51 = NTFS 1.0/1.1
WinNT 4.0* = NTFS 1.1
WinNT 5.0** = NTFS 5.0
WinNT 5.1*** = NTFS 5.1
*WinNT 4.0 Can use read/write NTFS 5.0 w/SP4. But not all partition functions are available. AKA Forced Upgrade's required to NT5
** WinNT 5.0 = Windows 2000
*** WInNT 5.1 = Windows XP(not includeing flavors)
I'm setting up a web-server and file-server for my dorm - which shall have upto 100 computers accessing it. The files are mostly small ones - almost all less than 10 MB. I want a journalling filesystem that journals file data as well as metadata. What should I use?
Loban Amaan Rahman ==> Anagram of ==> Aha! An Abnormal Man!
I have Partition Magic 7, but I have not installed it. Is that my best bet? Or is there an easier method?
make it simple and fast: use ext2 and mount it readonly. no journaling, no overhead. if this is not possible, you can use any of the supported fs.
If you don't know enough about the issues to make an informed decision, you should use ext2. If you think asking about it on Slash-the-banner-ads-dot will help, then you REALLY should just use ext2.
Which rescue floppies support ReiserFS? This is the primary reason I am avoiding JFSs at this time:
My desktop has lots of beta software and no UPS, therefore Tom's RootBoot is not an unheardof occurance.
If you are thinking of a small site without much requirements about reliability about the stored data Linux with some of the budget journalizing filesystems.
If you have high requirements about the correctness of the data and data-corruption you should get Solaris+Veritas.
I love people who say, just boot into the recovery console and fix stuff from there. Well let me tell you that that does NOT always work.
While trying to watch a DVD on my Win2K system one day it just crashed. Upon reboot I get a blue screen. Not a problem I think, I'll just use 2Ks much vaunted recovery console, but wouldn't you know it, every single safe mode also blue screened. Using bootdisks and the install CD didn't do any better. My system was completely locked out. If it wasn't for the fact that my system files were all installed on a FAT partition I would have had to reinstall from scratch. As it was, I could boot into Linux, copy the registry files from the fubar'd Win2K install, and write my own utility to repair it (the install disc registry repair feature and the repair disk both failed to fix it).
This taught me several valuable lessons.
1) Always install your system files on a FS that can be read from a DOS bootdisk or similar
2) Don't trust the recovery console, it relies too much on the registry
3) The install disc sucks at doing any kind of repairs
4) Repair Disks are not much better
5) Never again try to use the TV out feature on my GeForce2 MX
Can't we all just thrash along?
--Blair
And here's me think that tar (Tape ARchive ??) was *made* for backing up (onto tapes)... no?
djroute66 writes "How do I get slashdot.org's main page while trying to look as intelligent and suave as possible?"
Spoken rationally.
is not the default fs for suse.
Per Red Hat's RHCE training, ReiserFS is explicitly designed for the case of extremely fast access to many small files. It also uses space more efficiently with small files than any other filesystem on Linux, because it is able to glue together the small tails of the files into shared sectors.
/boot partition, and make that partition ext2 or ext3. Alternately, you can add the 'notails' option to your /etc/fstab file to turn off tail packing. If you aren't using many small files, this will not be a huge loss.
Example: You write a 513-byte file to a filesystem with 512-byte sectors. On other FS types, that file will take 2 sectors. On Reiser, it will take 1 sector plus change. Numerous small files of this type can have their tails packed into the same shared sector. I do not know the overhead in bytes per file, and thus don't know how many tails you can put into a given sector.
It also handles a very large number of files in the same directory well. Most other FS types have problems if you dump 10,000 files into a directory. It is my understanding that Reiser deals with this extremely well.
However, there is one drawback. If you are using LILO, the tail packing can cause you much grief. Lilo does not understand tails. It will be unable to execute its own second part or the kernel itself if either has had a tail-pack done. Thus, you should likely use a separate
Mandrake 8.0 came with a 2.2 kernel with ReiserFS backported. DO NOT try to use ReiserFS with any software RAID in any Linux 2.2 kernel. Make sure you update to 2.4. I believe 8.1 comes with 2.4 standard, so it shouldn't be an issue anymore with that distribution.
There have also been numerous bugfixes in the Reiser code over the 2.4 releases, so you will probably want to go with as recent a kernel as you can. Linus' 2.4 kernel tree has the reputation of being unstable, so you may want to use Alan Cox's branch until the official tree stabilizes better.
Damn, what an incredible troll. At first glance, it looked like a legitamate post, but after reading it more deeply, its true nature became obvious. Sir or madam, I salute you!
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
How about /. gets a licence for the Ask Jeeves engine so we don't have to read crap like this?
Partition types?! Honestly, this kind of stuff should be in a HOW-TO... Where is it going to go from here? This is going to end up turning into an Internet version of a write-in newspaper colum (Dear Slashdot, anyone?). We're going to have people asking things like:
"Dear Slashdot, I can't sign on to AOL anymore, what's wrong?"
"Dear Slashdot, my cat pissed in my monitor and now it smells bad and won't work, how can I fix it?"
"Dear Slashdot, what is the web address for jackinworld.com, I want to learn how to masturbate."
Ugh.
Agreed - it even got modded up! That was a well done troll.
I'd recommend that you put your data in a ReiserFS logical volume which is part of a volume group spanning two disks, mirrored. And turn off updating the access times for files with '-o noatime' and use SCSI.
Going mirrored will give the OS the opportunity to get the data from either spindle on reads.
just my $0.02
I don't know which FS is superior, but you might want to sersiously consider using a RAID.
What are these, different filing systems y'all have for your punchcards? Here in Montana, we just sort 'em by date. And, umm, we keep good daily journals.
Although advanced journaling filesystems only journal metadata, some journaling filesystems journal everything: when a disk write happens, the entire write is written to the journal file, then it's written to the real file, then it's deleted from the journal file.
When Ext3 was first created, it COULD NOT journal metadata -- the only option was full file journaling, which was incredibly slow. Don't tell me I'm wrong, because I read the original release notes which said that metadata journaling was not available yet. I believe that Ext3 can now do metadata-only journaling -- somebody correct me if I'm wrong -- but it's a fairly recent development, within the past year or so.
This mail message from about a year ago says that metadata support was "in an early state" at the time. I don't know if it's been perfected since then or not. But the e-mail proves that at one time, Ext3 could NOT do metadata-only journaling, which flat-out disproves your post that all journaling filesystems only journal metadata.
And RAID quite frankly has nothing to do with it; I can't even imagine why you brought it up because it's absolutely irrelevant.
Totally agree. And you know who is behind the WTC disaster and the Anthrax scare... Linus Torvalds.
For a little home PC serving 2 pages per day?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
After using reiserfs for a year++ and now having switched to xfs, my recommendation is the latter. There is a simple reason to this: reiserfs caches a lot. Even with 512Mb RAM I always ended up with swap after doing a few file transfers, and for a ftp site that is not so good, at least not if you plan to do other things with the computer as well.
A simple solution is of course to disable swap, but that is only a workaround. Until reiserfs gets a little lighter on caching, my recommendation is definitely xfs.
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But then if they came the day people were playing with Goatse.cx Ascii Art...
8| Gosh, that was horrible 8|
Just a quick example from myself..
/, /boot, /usr, /var, /home, and swap). Well, long story short, my HDD fscked up and crashed. I could still somewhat get into it, by throwing it on my workstation, but the /usr partition was the one that had all the problems, and that's where my webpages were (/usr/local/apache/).
/www partition just in case of emergency. I've set mine at 50 MB, and even that seems way too big for what I'm doing (barely anyone goes to the site, but it's all for fun), but it's all precautionary - if other partitions die on me, I could (hopefully) get into the system as single user, and save my pages instead of having to redo all of them.
I had a server running RedHat 6.2 with a standard server setup (partitions:
So, since then, I've created a
"My days are less enjoyable because of people." ~ Johnny the Homicidal Maniac
I am trying to find a OS that can answer an important question. Any suggestions on a Linux distribution that I can try would be appreciated.
Question: What is the meaning of life?
Lindows is better than both Linux and Windows.
And Big Macs are better than vi and Emacs combined.
Partition types... Jesus...