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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."
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.
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It's nice to have some type 8e around too - Linux LVM. Logical volume management lets you do some cool things, like re-sizing your partitions with the data in place. You can add free space to a logical volume with reiserfs while it's "live", although you have to unmount the volume if you want to shrink it. *Very* handy when you don't know at install-time exactly how much space is going to be taken up by your /home, /usr, /var/log, etc.
Of course the Amiga "RDB" partitioning scheme had its nice points too. Linux can read it, but I don't know if there are any Linux tools to create one.
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.