Re: ext3 on woody safe for a production machine?
Johann Spies <jspies@maties.sun.ac.za> writes:
JS> I am a newbie ftp-administrator trying to build a new ftp-server for
JS> our university.
JS> Kernel unstability with 2.4.9-ac3, ac16 and ac18 and some of
JS> unstability using reiserfs on the nbd-devices. We did not determine
JS> whether the problem was on the kernel's side or from reiserfs in
JS> combination with nbd.
JS>
JS> Now I want to try ext3 on the nbd-devices. The reason is that
JS> fsck'ing the 12 nbd-devices takes a lot of time. A journalling file
JS> system can help. I have 6 unofficial woody CD's and I see that
JS> ext3-utilities are part of woody (which is not the case with Redhat
JS> 7.1 which most of the machines here use).
JS>
JS> What are the experiences in this group with woody and ext3? Would you
JS> recommend it for a setup like ours?
So if this is for a production machine, where you presumably want as
close to zero downtime as you can get, you really want something where
the software's not going to be changing. If you assume that you'll
never reboot the server, it doesn't matter that fsck takes an hour,
since you'll (in theory) never see an fsck anyways.
In this environment, I'd recommend relatively proven software: Debian
stable, kernel 2.2.19, ext2fs.
IMHO, any kernel with "ac" ("Alan Cox Special") in the version number
is too unstable/potentially buggy to bother with (and I run Debian
unstable most of the time). In a production environment, you probably
can't tolerate software changing and servers restarting on a daily
basis, which means that woody's rolling-upgrade policy probably isn't
for you either.
Is there something in particular you need out of the testing branch or
the 2.4.x kernel? If so, you might be best off building it from
source and installing it under /usr/local, such that you know pretty
much exactly what's installed on your system.
--
David Maze dmaze@debian.org http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
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