On Tuesday 09 Nov 2004 21:53 pm, David James Pettifor wrote:
On Tuesday 09 November 2004 21:39, Dylan wrote: <SNIP> Wow!
That sure did help! I have not tried anything out as yet but I sure will do with such thorough advice. One thing though, what does the following mean?
substitute ext3 for ext2 if you told mke2fs to create the journal.
This is relevant to the question you asked Anders too. ext2 and ext3 are very similar filesystems, basically, ext3 is the same as ext2 except that it has a 'journal.' That means that when you write to the fs, the data isn't (necessarily) updated straight away, and that a record of 'transactions' (i.e. writes) is kept. There are at least two main benefits to this - writes tend to be faster, especially if the same data is re-written before it is 'committed' to the disk; the status of the on-disk data can be checked quickly, and to a great extent re-constructed if necessary. That means there are less filesystem checks as boot (my ext3 partitions are checked fully every 40 days or so, whereas IIRC ext2 is checked each boot) and that in the event of a crash less data if any will get lost/corrupted. in man mke2fs it describes the options which allow you to add the journal information so it makes an ext3 fs instead. If you just used: mke2fs /dev/hdb1 then you will have an ext2 filesystem, mke2fs -j /dev/hdb1 would create an ext3 fs. You can turn an ext2 into an ext3 fs by adding a journal with: tune2fs -j /dev/hdb1 but since the fs is empty, if you wanted to change it you could just as well re-format it. As for which to use... you'll likely get as many opinions as people answering. I can't talk for xfs since I've never used it (Anders already covered that anyway) but my preference is for ext3 because it is 'native' to the kernel, and can be mounted and used as an ext2 fs for recovery by emergency boot floppies without worrying about whether they have modules for other fs's. It is well supported by maintenance tools and interacts seamlessly with the rest of the system. I've used reiser, but found the maintenance tools lacking, and had stability issues when using it with nfs (but these are supposed to have been resolved.) When it comes to it, unless there is pressing reason to use another fs, I'm going to stick with ext3. Dylan -- "I see your Schwartz is as big as mine" -Dark Helmet