Sid Boyce (sboyce@blueyonder.co.uk) wrote something I wish to comment : (news:<42B3ED29.3090201@blueyonder.co.uk> posted on 18-juin-05 10:45:13)
The only times I've had reiserfs problems they have been due to hardware on the way out - IDE controller chips and other motherboard faults, reiserfsck has corrected the problem, but much later some hardware has died and that goes way back to when we first moved from ext2 (problems with ext2 also) to reiserfs. There is nothing unreliable about reiserfs and I'm using it on 3 SuSE boxes, 1 Mandrake, 1 gentoo and 1 Mandriva LE2005 box. When I was at work, I used Linux only on my laptop with SuSE/reiserfs in full confidence as it was my main tool with masses of work related stuff that was critically needed at customer sites, of course, backed up to my home machine with SuSE/reiserfs. I'm eagerly looking forward to reiser4 going mainstream.
I must admit I had to reset the computer twice. One was sometimes after the installation of 9.3. At boot up, the computer was "stuck" a very long time, showing just just a back screen with the cursor (underscore) at the top left corner. CTRL-ALT-DEL seem to have no effect, so I pushed reset. The second time was when I tried to configure X using SaX2 from runlevel 3. Again, all I could see was a black screen with the "X" mouse pointer. Again, CTRL-ALT-DEL didn't help to get out. So again, I pushed reset. Maybe THAT was the cause of the filesystem. But I was confident that the journalizing would do its job, and I later saw no signs that something was going wrong (until I found the mysterious hidden/unaccessible/unremovable files, that is). It took me two weeks to sort out the keyboard configuration issue (and find it was in fact an issue with ReiserFS). Althought it was somehow a good experience to learn a bit more about Linux, I had a bad time to trace the source of the problem. I hope I'll never "loose" files in such way anymore, that's why i'm a bit angry against a filesystem that is supposed to be more reliable than other non-journalising FS.
AND *DONE* ! The keyboard configuration issue is closed now.
Is that some sort of keypad you are using? I had a look at YaST yesterday, but it seemed to only offer configuration of one keyboard, so I didn't go any further to try to get my USB phone keypad working.
No. It's a PC105 keys type (BE layout). I don't know how USB keypad are supported, but I saw there is a xkeyboard-config package on DVD1. Maybe this can help (?)
(I wonder if I'll take the assle to switch from ReiserFS to Ext3. Is there a tool which perform a backup, format the partition, and restore the backup to it without much pain ?)
You could use something like rsync to blast it off to another box. If as I suspect it's hardware, you could at least prove that by going ext3 and getting the same problem.
Well, I'll stay with ReiserFS for the moment. Choosing a filesystem is usually something you decide at installation time. Changing the filesystem the OS is lying on is a bit more complicated afterward. When I was using Suse 8.0 (and ReiserFS), I found the access to disk to be slow (this on UW SCSI) or to be more precise, I could hear the disk being very busy. I wasn't sure if I had to blame the journalising taking too much time, or the swapping, but I thought I would give a try to Ext3 the next time I'll have to install Linux. Note: I have 384Mb (3 256Mb RAM stick, which later "turn into" 128Mb !?!). Is this short and can cause a lot of disk swapping ? Can it improve significantly if I install the swapp partition on another disk (I have an IDE disk with some spare space) ? But I'm giving a second chance to ReiserFS with my 9.3 installation :-) AmigaPhil, world citizen. /No MS-HTML mail please/ PGP key: 0x9C07F6C1 -----BEGIN CRYPT KEY----- The following garbage may or may not contain crypted message. At least you now know I'm an advocate for the respect of privacy. G3MOqRVfVUIFMIVtqxLtM1IlVRMlHTIFMlOnpxMzGaEFBvOdHvO6GzjtDJWUVUyJrSVtnyIh ElOzDacFVTAFLxA5HvObEaVtH2IFpySvJtcvHlOzD3WFpSHtoxSkVRAyIzyBpRjtp0WyYPOC nRptM1IvEaVtEKMHqHqzVR5yHvOdDzIUqFOEpyAlDKSJLIDtp0WyVR55JFOvHlObEvNuPt== -----END CRYPT KEY----- The Best Prophet of The Future is The Past