Re:My take on current filesystems
on
EXT4 Is Coming
·
· Score: 1
I think a lot of people misunderstand ReiserFS and filesystems in general. ReiserFS (3 and 4) acknowledges the fact that cpu is very fast and disk IO is slow. If you can do anything at all in cpu as far as calculations or optimizations to avoid having to make disk accesses it is a win. This is why ReiserFS takes more cpu. Overall it should be faster. It also assumes that your hardware is reliable. If your hardware is bogus you are going to have problems with any fs but particularly ReiserFS. The on disk and in-memory data structures are much more complicated than ext2/3/4. All designed to provide better performance. If you have a memory problem or disk controller problem or really any hardware problem at all you are in deep shit. Want good performance and data integrity? Use quality hardware and implement redundancy!
Journalled filesystems like ReiserFS easily handle power-out problems, accidental reboots, etc. These are not data corruption issues. But once some bogus piece of hardware starts causing random bits to be scribbled to the disk all bets are off. I don't even see the lack of an fsck program as a problem. If you ever get to the point where you need to do an fsck you really should just restore from backup. When I hear these stories about how people lost all of their data because their filesystem "crashed" I have two reactions: 1. Skepticism that they didn't have bogus hardware or didn't somehow screw themselves up. It is extremely rare that anyone can actually prove it was a bug in the fs that burned them. 2. Total lack of sympathy because they didn't have a backup.
Here's what I do:
I value my data so I spent an extra $100 to get another 250G disk and I mirror. $100 is DIRT CHEAP insurance against hard drive related failures. Disks are so cheap and big there is no excuse for not mirroring important data. Plus you get a bonus on read performance. If I offered you $100 to let me delete 250G of data from your machine right now would you let me? Then your data is worth more than $100 also and worthy of a mirrored disk. But a mirrored disk is not a backup. You need backups too.
I have Bacula setup to run every night. It makes a backup of my data to an external USB2 attached 80G drive. I don't back up all of my data as there is some stuff I really don't care about. But all of my email, source code, and vacation photos etc get backed up every night. I probably have 30G of data I really give a care about. I have two of these drives. I do a full backup once a month and incrementals every night after. At the end of the month I take the drive over to my storage unit (or a friends house would do, or even my desk at work) and swap it with a second drive which I have stashed there.
I think I paid around $80 for each of the external drives plus $100 for the extra disk for the mirror. So I have a really great, fast, reliable backup solution for $260 plus some time to set it up. Is it worth it? HELL YES! While writing this I just thought to do a test restore of some data. It worked. Yeay! My backup is solid and there if I need it.
If any one of you offered me...say, $1000 to come over to my house in San Diego right now to boot your own super-destructo CD which did a military grade erase of my HD's I would let you. RIGHT NOW. I have the data backed up. I figure my time to do the restore is worth $1k to me. And I'll have everything back up in 24 hours or less. If you can't do the same right now your data better not be important to you because that's how disasters happen: Completely unannounced.
Remember kids: If it wasn't backed up it wasn't important!
Asking to be taken off of a spammers list is definitely not vigilantism. Far too many people are talking here who have no idea how their service worked.
This could make the DDoS attack impractical. But for now it seems that the Cornell guys are playing their cards pretty close to their chest and not releasing source for their software so the rest of us can use it. Distributed Hash Tables are the way of the future.
Matrox is definitely still in the graphics card business. I have a Matrox dual-head card in my home machine and in my work machine. They open source their drivers. X works perfectly with no proprietary drivers needed.
I do not understand how IBM expects to sell mainframes when nobody knows how to use them. If I wanted to get out of the Unix/Linux biz and get into mainframes or even recommend a mainframe for use at my employer I would have to know something about using one. But I would not have any clue as to where I could go to get that kind of information or training. I have only met two mainframe knowledgable people in my whole life (among zillions of un*x people) and they are both old farts. Finding good Linux/perl/whatever people is hard enough. I can't even imagine having to recruit a mainframe person.
So where are you young mainframe people learning how to use mainframes?
No, I am saying that the completely standard hardware is more likey to be maintained by volunteers than the less common nonstandard hardware. That's just a fact of Free Software. Even BSD has this problem. I am running 2.6.16 with 4 Xen domains on a dual core AMD64 with SATA. A pretty trick setup and it is working great. What SATA chipset/mobo are you using? I have had to flash my stupid motherboard 3 times now with updates (MSI K8N mobo, I think choosing this mobo may have been a mistake) because of various things not working but it was always the fault of the motherboard so you might want to consider that also. Overall SATA works great. Just last night I upgraded my smartmontools to support SATA and now I can monitor my hard drive for signs of impending failure. My HD has 6132 hours of powered up time and has remapped one bad sector. Pretty cool to be able to get that kind of useful diagnostic info out of it.
How does having everything in the kernel make it hard to maintain separate drivers? Many people seem to be doing just fine with maintaining their own drivers outside of the kernel. I rather like having everything distributed together. It does not hurt the reliability of your kernel to have drivers in the source tree that you are not actually running.
No, I cannot say that I spend my free time reading kernel changelogs. Why would bugs be pointed out in changelogs? They were changing something, discovered a bug, and did not bother to fix it while they were touching the buggy code themselves? Is there no bug tracking database for the kernel? If the changelogs are all they've got it is no wonder bugs aren't getting fixed. FWIW I use a Sony TRV-250 with firewire on kernel 2.6.16 and never get dropped frames so maybe that particular bug has been fixed. Sound drivers have always been a problem due to the wide variety of sound hardware that is out there. I've never heard of ice1724. My machine uses ac97/intel8x0. I have had a number of ac97 sound chipsets but never an ice1724. What we really need is for the vendors of this hardware to step up to the plate and fix their stuff. They are the ones who really should be contributing and maintaining these drivers in the first place. If nobody is interested in fixing ice1724 problems I would recommend going with a sound chipset that somebody does care about.
I see a lot of hand waving about how buggy 2.6 is but I do not see any references to bug databases or particular reproduceable bugs. How about some data?
So far 2.6 has been just as solid for me as previous kernel versions but I try really hard to avoid using bizarro hardware and drivers that probably do not get much testing, and rightly so.
I think we need to distinguish between bugs in the core kernel (code that everyone runs) and bugs in drivers. The vast majority of the Linux kernel code is drivers.
You could also say the car doesn't have a board of directors so terrible analogy. That's not the point. Analogies can hardly ever be taken beyond the immediate context of what is being demonstrated and that is that both companies and cars need something to make them go and without it they stop.
Those forms of consumer revolt deny the company money. Just like denying a car gasoline this will cause the company to eventually stop functioning. I think the OP made a very good point. There is no point in treating a company like a person. Companies are also completely amoral.
...is all I care about anymore. A zillion bits per second in the lab or even in a backbone link doesn't do me a bit of good when my cablemodem has me restricted to 128k of upstream bandwidth. I just put together a killer computer system with more cpu, memory, RAM, and disk than I am likely to need anytime soon all for less than a kilobuck but decent bandwidth is still simply not available.
Just use Thunderbird with the Enigmail plugin. She won't have to do anything unusual except enter her password when prompted. You could even sign her key for her and then anyone who trusts you has the opportunity to trust her also. I really wish more people would use encrypted email. I also wish the enigmail plugin worked on FC4 on x86_64 architecture.
I'm talking about who is the better person. I am sure if Linus had that kind of money to give away to such a worthy cause he would. You completely missed the entire point of my post.
...giving away a billion of your $50 billion which you will never miss or giving away your lifes work like people such as Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman have done?
It is not yet clear to me who has really helped society more (only time will tell) but I know who has made the greater personal sacrifices worthy of my admiration.
You make a good point. I believe the efficiency of biodiesel is measured at the engine. The efficiency of photovoltaic is usually measured at the leads coming off the panel. After the losses incurred from transferring the electricity from the photovoltaic panel to a storage facility, putting it into a battery, and then transferring it from a battery to an electric motor what sort of efficiency do you get?
Biodiesal *IS* solar power. Where do you think the energy present in the plant matter comes from? Not only that but it is probably more efficient on a $/watt basis. I'm all for photovoltaics and stuff but electricity storage for vehicles is still a tricky problem whereas chemical storage of energy has worked great for many decades now.
This is not a theoretical statement, but current practice. I've heard of research projects getting their commercial fundings withdrawn, because they were about to develop a permanent cure instead of a temporal one.
I have been spending a lot of time in Vietnam recently (6 months of the last year) and while I am there I always use my prepaid mobile phone. It is very sad to see that many companies over there can do it but there is a patent on such a simple idea here in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
I think a lot of people misunderstand ReiserFS and filesystems in general. ReiserFS (3 and 4) acknowledges the fact that cpu is very fast and disk IO is slow. If you can do anything at all in cpu as far as calculations or optimizations to avoid having to make disk accesses it is a win. This is why ReiserFS takes more cpu. Overall it should be faster. It also assumes that your hardware is reliable. If your hardware is bogus you are going to have problems with any fs but particularly ReiserFS. The on disk and in-memory data structures are much more complicated than ext2/3/4. All designed to provide better performance. If you have a memory problem or disk controller problem or really any hardware problem at all you are in deep shit. Want good performance and data integrity? Use quality hardware and implement redundancy!
Journalled filesystems like ReiserFS easily handle power-out problems, accidental reboots, etc. These are not data corruption issues. But once some bogus piece of hardware starts causing random bits to be scribbled to the disk all bets are off. I don't even see the lack of an fsck program as a problem. If you ever get to the point where you need to do an fsck you really should just restore from backup. When I hear these stories about how people lost all of their data because their filesystem "crashed" I have two reactions: 1. Skepticism that they didn't have bogus hardware or didn't somehow screw themselves up. It is extremely rare that anyone can actually prove it was a bug in the fs that burned them. 2. Total lack of sympathy because they didn't have a backup.
Here's what I do:
I value my data so I spent an extra $100 to get another 250G disk and I mirror. $100 is DIRT CHEAP insurance against hard drive related failures. Disks are so cheap and big there is no excuse for not mirroring important data. Plus you get a bonus on read performance. If I offered you $100 to let me delete 250G of data from your machine right now would you let me? Then your data is worth more than $100 also and worthy of a mirrored disk. But a mirrored disk is not a backup. You need backups too.
I have Bacula setup to run every night. It makes a backup of my data to an external USB2 attached 80G drive. I don't back up all of my data as there is some stuff I really don't care about. But all of my email, source code, and vacation photos etc get backed up every night. I probably have 30G of data I really give a care about. I have two of these drives. I do a full backup once a month and incrementals every night after. At the end of the month I take the drive over to my storage unit (or a friends house would do, or even my desk at work) and swap it with a second drive which I have stashed there.
I think I paid around $80 for each of the external drives plus $100 for the extra disk for the mirror. So I have a really great, fast, reliable backup solution for $260 plus some time to set it up. Is it worth it? HELL YES! While writing this I just thought to do a test restore of some data. It worked. Yeay! My backup is solid and there if I need it.
If any one of you offered me...say, $1000 to come over to my house in San Diego right now to boot your own super-destructo CD which did a military grade erase of my HD's I would let you. RIGHT NOW. I have the data backed up. I figure my time to do the restore is worth $1k to me. And I'll have everything back up in 24 hours or less. If you can't do the same right now your data better not be important to you because that's how disasters happen: Completely unannounced.
Remember kids: If it wasn't backed up it wasn't important!
Asking to be taken off of a spammers list is definitely not vigilantism. Far too many people are talking here who have no idea how their service worked.
We desperately need to implement new internet infrastructure. I am highly in favor of:
n s.php
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/beehive/codo
This could make the DDoS attack impractical. But for now it seems that the Cornell guys are playing their cards pretty close to their chest and not releasing source for their software so the rest of us can use it. Distributed Hash Tables are the way of the future.
someone got paid.
Matrox is definitely still in the graphics card business. I have a Matrox dual-head card in my home machine and in my work machine. They open source their drivers. X works perfectly with no proprietary drivers needed.
I do not understand how IBM expects to sell mainframes when nobody knows how to use them. If I wanted to get out of the Unix/Linux biz and get into mainframes or even recommend a mainframe for use at my employer I would have to know something about using one. But I would not have any clue as to where I could go to get that kind of information or training. I have only met two mainframe knowledgable people in my whole life (among zillions of un*x people) and they are both old farts. Finding good Linux/perl/whatever people is hard enough. I can't even imagine having to recruit a mainframe person.
So where are you young mainframe people learning how to use mainframes?
No, I am saying that the completely standard hardware is more likey to be maintained by volunteers than the less common nonstandard hardware. That's just a fact of Free Software. Even BSD has this problem. I am running 2.6.16 with 4 Xen domains on a dual core AMD64 with SATA. A pretty trick setup and it is working great. What SATA chipset/mobo are you using? I have had to flash my stupid motherboard 3 times now with updates (MSI K8N mobo, I think choosing this mobo may have been a mistake) because of various things not working but it was always the fault of the motherboard so you might want to consider that also. Overall SATA works great. Just last night I upgraded my smartmontools to support SATA and now I can monitor my hard drive for signs of impending failure. My HD has 6132 hours of powered up time and has remapped one bad sector. Pretty cool to be able to get that kind of useful diagnostic info out of it.
How does having everything in the kernel make it hard to maintain separate drivers? Many people seem to be doing just fine with maintaining their own drivers outside of the kernel. I rather like having everything distributed together. It does not hurt the reliability of your kernel to have drivers in the source tree that you are not actually running.
No, I cannot say that I spend my free time reading kernel changelogs. Why would bugs be pointed out in changelogs? They were changing something, discovered a bug, and did not bother to fix it while they were touching the buggy code themselves? Is there no bug tracking database for the kernel? If the changelogs are all they've got it is no wonder bugs aren't getting fixed. FWIW I use a Sony TRV-250 with firewire on kernel 2.6.16 and never get dropped frames so maybe that particular bug has been fixed. Sound drivers have always been a problem due to the wide variety of sound hardware that is out there. I've never heard of ice1724. My machine uses ac97/intel8x0. I have had a number of ac97 sound chipsets but never an ice1724. What we really need is for the vendors of this hardware to step up to the plate and fix their stuff. They are the ones who really should be contributing and maintaining these drivers in the first place. If nobody is interested in fixing ice1724 problems I would recommend going with a sound chipset that somebody does care about.
I see a lot of hand waving about how buggy 2.6 is but I do not see any references to bug databases or particular reproduceable bugs. How about some data?
So far 2.6 has been just as solid for me as previous kernel versions but I try really hard to avoid using bizarro hardware and drivers that probably do not get much testing, and rightly so.
I think we need to distinguish between bugs in the core kernel (code that everyone runs) and bugs in drivers. The vast majority of the Linux kernel code is drivers.
Ok, but I don't see how hurricane Katrina was Bush's fault. Seemed like an act of nature to me. And you said "cities" plural.
I'm confused. Are you seriously predicting the destruction of major American cities over the next couple of years? Seems pretty unlikely to me.
You could also say the car doesn't have a board of directors so terrible analogy. That's not the point. Analogies can hardly ever be taken beyond the immediate context of what is being demonstrated and that is that both companies and cars need something to make them go and without it they stop.
Those forms of consumer revolt deny the company money. Just like denying a car gasoline this will cause the company to eventually stop functioning. I think the OP made a very good point. There is no point in treating a company like a person. Companies are also completely amoral.
...is all I care about anymore. A zillion bits per second in the lab or even in a backbone link doesn't do me a bit of good when my cablemodem has me restricted to 128k of upstream bandwidth. I just put together a killer computer system with more cpu, memory, RAM, and disk than I am likely to need anytime soon all for less than a kilobuck but decent bandwidth is still simply not available.
No, it isn't. You can encrypt the whole IMAP/SMTP session. I do.
Just use Thunderbird with the Enigmail plugin. She won't have to do anything unusual except enter her password when prompted. You could even sign her key for her and then anyone who trusts you has the opportunity to trust her also. I really wish more people would use encrypted email. I also wish the enigmail plugin worked on FC4 on x86_64 architecture.
er...I modify and do custom jobs to make money and do quite well at it. There is definitely a market. A big one even.
My company:
http://copilotconsulting.com/
The website is sparse at the moment but I've already got more than enough word of mouth business.
I'm talking about who is the better person. I am sure if Linus had that kind of money to give away to such a worthy cause he would. You completely missed the entire point of my post.
...giving away a billion of your $50 billion which you will never miss or giving away your lifes work like people such as Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman have done?
It is not yet clear to me who has really helped society more (only time will tell) but I know who has made the greater personal sacrifices worthy of my admiration.
You make a good point. I believe the efficiency of biodiesel is measured at the engine. The efficiency of photovoltaic is usually measured at the leads coming off the panel. After the losses incurred from transferring the electricity from the photovoltaic panel to a storage facility, putting it into a battery, and then transferring it from a battery to an electric motor what sort of efficiency do you get?
Biodiesal *IS* solar power. Where do you think the energy present in the plant matter comes from? Not only that but it is probably more efficient on a $/watt basis. I'm all for photovoltaics and stuff but electricity storage for vehicles is still a tricky problem whereas chemical storage of energy has worked great for many decades now.
...it gets chicks!
Got anything to back this up?
BTW: I heard your mother smelled of elderberries.
I have been spending a lot of time in Vietnam recently (6 months of the last year) and while I am there I always use my prepaid mobile phone. It is very sad to see that many companies over there can do it but there is a patent on such a simple idea here in the US.
Always proofread carefully to make sure you haven't any words out.