RE: small school: replacements for MS Word and Excel
I have been running Linux 2.0.36 for the past year on 3 sites and have had
ext2 go down on each of them after a power failure.
Much of the time running fsk manually fixed the problem, other times the
systems were totally unbootable.
The problem has gotten so bad that we have had to put UPS backups on all our
linux machines, even though we are using brand name hardware.
We used to run slackware 2.0.0 on a few clones and we never had any problems
even though we abused them many a time in resetting them and powerring down
without shutdown.
I will agree though that linux is far far far more robust than any of the NT
or Win95/98/Me systems we have here.
I should also say for completeness that the Novell Server we have is as
reliable if not more so than the linux machines.
Ian
-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan D. Proulx [mailto:jon@ai.mit.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2001 12:25 PM
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: small school: replacements for MS Word and Excel
On Tue, Jun 05, 2001 at 02:03:02AM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
:Sean Morgan <macinslak@mac.com> wrote:
:>OK, the two messages previous posts kind of play off eachother so I'm
:>going to reply to them in one go. First off ext2, it has a really bad
:>habit of losing files in hard crashes and power outages, this isn't a
:>problem for someone like you or I as we know how to recover them, for a
:>student with no root and no knowledge of how to do this, it's called a
:>couple of hours work down the tubes.
:
:I have to say, I've never lost a file to an ext2 disk crash, nor even
:had to go any further than the odd prompted "run fsck manually" to
:recover it,
On extremely flaky hardware, such as Colin goes on to describe, I have
"lost" file on ext2, but only in extreme cases. And I put "lost" in
quotes because I know that they're in the lost-found directory, just
with a weird name and some careful use of `file` and `grep` has gotten
them back. Though honestly even with crashes under load this doesn't
often happen, and even in the rare cases when it does 99% of those are
just netscape cache files I don't care about.
NTFS and FAT on the other hand I've lost system files that render the
machine unbootable (happened on 3 systems in the past 2 months), I
haven't lost a file on ext2 ever and the last "lost" file was about 6
months ago.
Linux beats out M$ in my lab atleast 2 to 1. The only Un*x system
I've really had a lot of trouble with was a Solaris UFS file system on
a very old drive that just went insane while mounted and under heavy
NFS use (got that back with fsck too, eventually).
So in my experience ext2 is much more robust than M$ offerings.
Reiserfs is *probably* a bit better <hearsay>though I hear when
journaled filesystems do manage to get wedged it's all over
</hearsay>. RAID mirroring is also an option for the paranoid (not to
suggest paranoia is always unwarrented), but this is probably a bit
more technicaly complex than you want to get.
-Jon
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