Filesystem wars! (was Re: woody CDs :()

[Shawn Rutledge]

Distro wars are passe', time for some filesystem wars maybe?  :-)

I've been using ReiserFS for a while now.  I had some problems but after
much head-scratching, restoring from backups repeatedly (thank goodness I
actually had backups for once!), getting a new hard drive, switching to a
different machine, and losing some data that wasn't backed up, I finally
narrowed it down to problems with DMA on my IDE controller.  Strange, DMA
works with one drive on the primary controller, but not with the other
drive on the secondary.  I wonder if 100 gig drives are "just different"
somehow.

Anyway AFAICT ReiserFS works well.  I tried ext3 and ext2 on that drive
that was having problems, and those got hosed just as much, so after that
I knew it had to be a hardware problem.  I've used ReiserFS on about 7 or
so machines now, everything OK except on that blasted 100 gig drive.
(And everything is OK now on that drive too, with DMA turned off.)
This is the second 100 gig drive, the first one got dropped on the
floor, so I sent it back to Western Digital.  We'll see if they figure
out that I dropped it.  It was making "click-click" noises that I didn't
like even before I dropped it.

You can get Debian install disks for ReiserFS here:
http://chao.ucsd.edu/debian/boot-floppies/ 

The install process is modified to give you a choice, which format you
want for your root filesystem.  Otherwise the install works like usual.
And, you should use GRUB instead of LILO.  It's cooler anyway (you will
write the MBR only once, after that it actually reads its menu list off
of the Linux filesystem, by name rather than by sector number. And has a
better-looking menu system.)

What advantages does XFS have?  Maybe more tried-and-true due to age?
Do you suppose its acquired stability has completely survived the porting
to Linux?

BTW if anybody is using Coda successfully I could use help with that too.
Kindof got put on the back burner after all the other troubles, but
redundancy would sure be nice, to know I will not lose access to my /home
directories just because one machine went down.  But it seems to eat
memory like no tomorrow, and has a practical limit of 8 gigs or so of
storage that it can manage, because the memory required for caching is
proportional to the disk space allocated. "It ate up all the mem'ry, it
ate up all the swap; it tried to eat some mo-re, but the kernel said
'just stop!'" And I can see it mounted but can't read or write any files
there.

Meanwhile Intermezzo seems too immature and only works on top of an ext3
filesystem.

On Wed, Mar 20, 2002 at 10:23:05AM -0700, Blake Barnett wrote:
> For those who want to install Woody and perhaps tinker with XFS, I
> highly recommend these boot floppies/ISO:
> 
> http://people.debian.org/~blade/XFS-Install/
> 
> (try the mirror for quicker downloads).
> 
> It works great, the installer is much improved.
> 
> 
> On Tue, 2002-03-19 at 18:09, der.hans wrote:
> > moin, moin,
> > 
> > I have been getting errors when trying to copy my new woody CDs, so I won't
> > have copies for people tonight. Sorry.
> > 
> > ciao,
> > 
> > der.hans
> > -- 
> > #  http://home.pages.de/~lufthans/   http://www.<ThisSpaceAvailable>.com/
> > #  Knowledge is useless unless it's shared. - der.hans
> > 
> > ________________________________________________
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> > 
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> -- 
> Blake Barnett (bdb)  <blake.barnett@developonline.com>
> Sr. Unix Administrator
> DevelopOnline.com                 office: 480-377-6816
> 
> Learning is a skill, you get better at it with practice.
> 
> ________________________________________________
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> 
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-- 
  _______                   Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD  ecloud@bigfoot.com
 (_  | |_)                       http://ecloud.org  kb7pwd@kb7pwd.ampr.org
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