Re: Synching disk on logout -- switched to EXT3
On Sun, 4 Jan 2004, Andy Firman wrote:
> To test it, I had a bunch of files open and services running
> and killed the power on the machine.
>
> The system came right back up no problem. I like it. :-)
>
> Now, why not do this on all systems?
>
> (I manage 7 Debian boxes very far away so I should convert to ext3.)
>
> The only argument I have seen by googling, is one fellow who says
> that if his hardware is failing, he wants to know about it and
> ext3 won't tell you about possible disk failures.
betting that ext3 will not screw up when you hit the power switch
or brownouts or admin mistakes would NOT be a good bet...
- the system will one day hang from one of those ex2/ext3 failures
- when the system hangs, it will be sitting there, typically
asking you to type the root passwd to continue the e2fsck
i'd do the above "power off test" a few hundred times while the
system is trying to write data to disk ... just so that there is
"data" that is supposedly important that the customers doesnt want to
lose when the brrown out or power failure or reset-happy-fingers
came along
- and without a monitor or keyboard hoocked up to the box,
they cant tell you what the machine is doing other than
"its not working right" and you cant ssh into it since
it wants to run e2fsck on itself
if the ability for the "non-techie" user to power off the box
to "fix the problem" is a good thing, than use xfs or jfs or
reiserfs instead of ext3
- or better still, use initrd and boot off a compact flash
or cdrom so that it doesnt matter what's on disk or memory
as far as power off is concerned
c ya
alvin
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