(OT) Mailing list server problems

[Fairlight]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2017 at 03:56:37PM -0800, Bill Campbell via Filepro-list thus spoke:
> 
> The only file systems I've had horrible experience were reiserfs.
> They were default on early versions of SuSE, and possibly Caldera.

That's funny, because I've spent the last five years working with reiserfs,
and find that it's remarkably resilient and reliable.  It's certainly
better designed than ext4, in terms of not painting you into corners.  It
doesn't even have a concept of limits on the inode table, much less a
static one.  Literally, zero is returned for total, used, and free by a
`df -i`.  That's why it's so shocking going from reiserfs to ext4.  You
immediately run into a brick wall, if you're using the filesystem a
particular way.

> 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.

Tell me we're not going to totally revisit the "one large root filesystem"
vs not arguments. :)

The default installations of most distros like to segregate /home/ and
leave everything else in / itself (including /usr/, /var/, etc.).  If
you're going to refuse to back out the rest of the major heirarchy, I see
no reason to have a really annoying system by splitting off /home/,
especially when /home/ is barely used on many production systems.  Then you
end up resorting to the game of musical symlinks to point things where you
really want them.

I won't say filesystems don't go bad, and I won't say that it's not worse
if everything is on one.  I know better.  I've also never had one go
tits-up since SCO 3.2.4.2.  I've never lost -any- partition on a linux
system, if the underlying hardware wasn't starting to die or suffering a
failure.

I dunno...  I don't generally lose sleep over using a unified filesystem.
It's possible that I have less issues because I generally eschew LVM/LVM2,
and am not spanning multiple hardware devices with a single volume.  I
understand what benefits LVM brings to the table, but I still find it
a royal PITA as an architecture.  I prefer old-school partition-based
provisioning unless there's a real reason to invoke LVM.

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.