Journaling FS for Production Systems

["I. Forbes" <iforbes@zsd.co.za>]

Hello All

I am looking at moving some of our "potato" based production 
servers onto woody, and at the same time upgrading onto a 
journaling FS.

I need the FS to meet the following in order of importance:

-   MUST BE STABLE (our income depends on uptime!) 

-   Must be supported in woody, without too much extra fiddling. 

-   Good "power switch abuse" recoverability.  EXT2 is pretty good,
    except if you have multiple reboots, you need to run fsck
    manually (at least with the standard debian init scripts).  I
    can live with fsck, but I would prefer no manual intervention. 

-   Good performance for "Maildir" directories.  (We run Exim, 
    Courier IMAP and SQWebmail as standard). 

-   Software RAID 1 disk mirroring on IDE drives.  Something new but
    very necessary. 

-   Suitable for use on a root file system on a machine with one
    partition.  - (Availability of boot/installation disks would be
    nice.  We currently do installations from 3 stiffy disks and the
    rest from the LAN using nfs/ftp/http) 

-   File system quota support (nice but not essential). 

-   NFS support would be nice to have, but not essential. 

Without wishing to start a flame ware, can anybody give me a quick 
run-down on which of the above criteria new generation file 
systems, like Reiser, XFS, EXT3, etc  meet.

Thanks

Ian

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Ian Forbes ZSD
http://www.zsd.co.za
Office: +27 +21 683-1388  Fax: +27 +21 64-1106
Snail Mail: P.O. Box 46827, Glosderry, 7702, South Africa
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