RE: Linux Mail server...

["Ian Lowe" <ian@xxxxxxx>]

>I thought your problem was caused by the Highpoint card rather than the
>ext3 volume that it contained?

Well, *this time* it was the highpoint controller that buggered up the
ext3 volume, fairly certain of that, but with some juggling, the raid
set was readable: the /boot partition for instance, mounted perfectly on
the raid set with a missing disk: just the "/" partition that was
hosed.

The problem with ext3 is that whereas a broken NTFS or FAT volume can be
accessed, with just a BSOD or lockup when you read the damaged areas,
ext3 is an all-or-nothing thing: it mounts, or it doesn't. If there's
any problem with the volume, you run e2fsck: if it works, great, if not,
you just lost the *entire* thing: you get *nothing* back. :(

In my experience, when you are talking about home servers where we all
tinker, and reboot the machines much more than in a production
environment, the roulette wheel of ext3 is just too dangerous.

>If it's important then it should be backed up regularly ...
>we all know that. :-(

Absolutely, yeah. The point I was making in this case, was that backup
is important when using Windows file systems, but it's far beyond
important on ext3: it's an absolute essential, as you will almost
certainly have to use it at some point.

As always, we can only talk about our own experience, and this is mine:
I have *never* lost data that was held on a FAT file system: there's
always been an option, using another machine, getting *some* of the
files back, using Norton rescue type tools.. on NTFS, I have lost data
once, and even then, I got a huge amount of information from the disk,
it wasn't a total loss. On ext3, I have lost data three times, and in
each case, I have lost the entire volume: running the e2fsck utility
simply obliterated the volume.

This was twice to power glitches that caused the machine to crash, and
once just out of the blue on boot one morning: add to that two incidents
where I had a random lockup (dodgy ISDN card I think) and ended up
having to run an fsck that took TWENTY EIGHT HOURS to complete, not
knowing till the end whether I had got back my files, or lost the lot,
and it's a hassle I can do without!!

I would stress that this is the first time I have lost anything
important, normally I have had a tape backup in place to get things
back, and the data lost has been some pictures, or a couple of MP3s,
etc. It's the hassle of the thing.

I have also had creeping corruption: holding a lot of MP3s (over 220 Gb)
on ext3 (and this is not RAID, just regular disks on a standard IDE
controller) Every now and then, we came across the odd file with a size
of 3.4 Exabytes, obviously filesystem corruption: and every now and
then, it would happen to a file that you knew was good a few weeks
earlier..

Linux as an OS certainly seems more stable to me than windows (2000,xp,
we'll see about 2k3!) but It's my opinion that storing *anything*
important on an ext3 filesystem without an absolutely robust (and
regularly tested) backup in place is like putting a loaded gun to your
own head.

I.


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