Electricity Cutoffs, EXT3 and Filesystems

[Volkan YAZICI <yazicivo@ttmail.com>]

Hi,

I had used to be a ReiserFS user ~4 years and never had even a single
problem with it. It was blazingly fast and there isn't a second
filesystem I know of that could challange with it in the speed of
recovering at the boot after a system crash or electricity cutoff.

This year I'm obligated to administrate extra ~5 production servers and
as a result of major GNU/Linux headquarters moving from ReiserFS to
EXT3, I started to use EXT3 in those new servers. But unfortunately,
after every electricity cutoff[1], EXT3 just crashes and waits prompt
from me standing at boot. I start the servers with Knoppix (Gee!) and
run e2fsck on every single partition. (Keep on imagining this PITA!) No,
pressing `Y' to run a fsck on the partitions doesn't work. I tried my
luck with XFS, but it resulted same as EXT3.

Please, I don't want to start a flamewar between filesystems. But could
anybody give any recommendations to me? Should I switch back to ReiserFS
for my own mental sake? Is it possible to configure EXT3 to behave in a
more automatized manner and recover from crashes with minimum human
interruption? Do others also experience similar problems?


Regards.

[1] Yes, we have couples of UPS boxes around, but they are not capable
    of standing the load for many hours. And yes, this is "Banana
    Republic" and companies cut your electricity off without a clue.