friendly file system advice

[Bill Campbell]

On Thu, Aug 10, 2006, Collins Richey wrote:
>On 8/10/06, James McDonald <james at jamesmcdonald.id.au> wrote:
>
>> >
>> Interestingly the new postpath.com  dropin replacement server for M$
>> Exchange recommends XFS for the file system.
>>
>
>Given the fact the XFS is the oldest (and some say most solid) of the
>journaling fs, I always get a chuckle out of the fact that Red Hat
>can't be bothered to support it for enterprise customers.

I did run into an issue with an xfs file system recently in which
the file system couldn't be mounted after a power failure.

The fsck.xfs program is a no-op, and the mount program is
supposed to take care of any cleanup necessary, but it was saying
things about bad superblocks.  It took me a while to remember
the xfs_repair program which worked fine to clean things up.

We generally build systems with ext3 for the root file system,
and xfs for /home and other non-root systems.  I want the root
file system to be as bullet-proof as possible, and don't care
about the occassional fsck as it isn't very large.  We generally
have two equal sized ext3 file systems, one for root, and the
other for a copy of the root file system with /etc/fstab tweaked
so that we can boot off the backup file system in case ``/'' gets
trashed.

I've had some very bad experieces with reiserfs trashing data so
have been avoiding it for years.

Bill
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