(OT) Mailing list server problems

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2017, Fairlight via Filepro-list wrote:
>On Mon, Feb 13, 2017 at 02:30:15PM -0800, Bill Campbell via Filepro-list thus spoke:
>> >
>> >What filesystem are you using?  I want to know which to avoid for life.  :)
>> 
>> ext3.
>
>Interesting.  I've never seen ext3 bail like that before.  Ever.  
>
>I honestly think the last filesystem I -really- saw lose it was whatever
>was on SCO 3.2.4.2.  Everything else has been pretty mild, in comparison.
>I've not seen anything go to lost+found for probably over fifteen years.

The only file systems I've had horrible experience were reiserfs.
They were default on early versions of SuSE, and possibly Caldera.

>> Nope.  I'm running ext4 on a couple of systems, and haven't had
>> problems so far.
>> 
>> All of our systems use courier-imap which stores in Maildir
>> format, one file per message.  So far haven't run into issues
>> with this even with ISPs having over 10,000 accounts.
>
>Hmmm.  Not sure if the inode table in ext3 was static or not.  I didn't
>think so, as the old systems had no issues with any sort of inode ratio,
>while the new ones did.
>
>It's just weird to see any non-ext4 version of extX lose its marbles.
>Historically, it's been widely used and pretty damned stable.  Bad
>experience, to be sure.  :(

Fortunately having most of our servers running in VMs with
snapshot capabilities, it was pretty easy to restore from the
most recent snapshot, then boot from CD and use rsync from the
most recent nightly backup.  Furthermore, there's nothing but the
OS under the '/' root file system, everything else is on separate
files systems which typically aren't as vulnerable to damage as
the root file system.

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
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