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Subject: Re: Redhat Linux, Mailman and Sendmail
From: Bennett Todd (betrahul.net)
Date: Tue Apr 04 2000 - 15:43:15 CDT

2000-04-04-16:21:58 Brad Knowles:
> I'd also like to point out that the author himself mentions in his
> own paper that ext3fs would probably not be suitable for use as a
> filesystem for /tmp [...] and by the same token it would also not
> be suitable as a filesystem for use on /var/spool/mqueue.

Understandable; the focus of a Journalling or log-style filesystem
is to try and allow really horking big filesystems --- hundreds of
gigs and up --- to avoid Really Bloody Long fsck times. ext2fs is
pretty good; but every once in a while, when an internal counter
hits a limit, it runs a fsck anyway and that takes way, way too long
for gigantic filesystems.

ext2fs is already a superb mqueue filesystem, and quite satisfactory
for tmp as well.

> However, in the meanwhile, if you are a Linux administrator but
> you can't write your own filesystem code, your only option that
> would allow you to increase your safety to acceptable levels may
> be to change the mount points of your filesystems from async to
> synchronous, and then to wait for the new and improved filesystems
> to come.

If the data loss from async updates is in practice less common than
the data loss from hard drive failures, then you'd be wrong ---
the best approach for responsible email systems admins would be
to run a really high-performance system like Linux and #-out the
postfix-script code to chattr the spools. Get the email on through
the spool and into some place else.

I used to administer BSD systems. And System-V based systems. And
systems after the two coalesced into a big, shimmering, wobbly mass.
And I used to see fsck come up dirty, occasionally.

Now I administer Linux systems, and I think it's time to investigate
#-ing out the boot-time fsck, since it never needs to do anything.

-Bennett

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