[juneau-lug] Re: Recent power outage problems

  • From: "Stephen E. Bodnar" <sbodnar@xxxxxxx>
  • To: juneau-lug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 19:24:37 -0800

When you have a system crash (rare with linux but it DOES 
occasionally happen) or power outage or hardware failure (or don't 
shut the system down properly), the system locks the temporary system 
files so that they can't be changed until it has rebuilt itself and 
recovered. Watch out for /proc - that's the system chalkboard - and 
there is nothing remotely humanly useable in there (short of a few 
files that some of the configuration utilities read). A 
non-journalling filesystem normally runs a "cleanup" job out of the 
system cron on a regular basis (usually every few hours but at least 
once a day), and it is done during a normal shutdown.

The advantage of a journalling filesystem such as ext3 or Reiserfs is 
that every read/write is "logged" to the filesystem and so in the 
case of minor/major disaster, the filesystem knows where everything 
on disk is at all times. Hard to lose anything this way short of 
physical damage to the disk itself. This also speeds booting the 
system.

The disadvantage used to be that it slowed disk read/writes 
considerably, but the newer versions have managed to iron a lot of 
kinks out and sped things up tremendously.

How do you normally shutdown your computer?

Stephen

>What are the advantages/disadvantages of journaling? ext3?
>
>It seemd that w/ every boot a different partician would be read-only. My
>'/tmp' and '/usr' are both on their own particians. My read-only problem
>has seemd to of cleared up. If converting it to a journaling ext file
>system will prevent this in the future, I'll do it.
>
>Thanks.
>
>-sean


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