(OT) Mailing list server problems

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Feb 13, 2017, Fairlight via Filepro-list wrote:
>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.

I'm surprised.  I thought reiserfs was long gone.

>> 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.

All our Linux systems are set up using the OpenPKG portable
packaging system such that everthing critical is under the
/home file system (/home/csoft/csrelnn symlinked to /csoft).
There are very minimal hooks into the root file system, the SYSV
init scripts to start and stop the OpenPKG system, and a half
dozen lines in crontab.

On systems with large numbers of users or users with huge $HOME
directories, we've set up /home1, /home2, ... so we can spread
their usage across file systems.

I would love to have zfs, but would have to go to freebsd or
solaris to get proper support.

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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