[sclug] ext2 disaster recovery

[Roland Turner]

On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 12:26:44PM +0100, Andy Arbon wrote:

> I've got 2 ext3 linux machines (desktop & server) on this network and my
> housemate has another 3 (2 desktop & 1 server) and we've never had any
> filesystem corruption at all after a power cut even though machines have
> been in every state from idle to mid-huge-compliation (I use gentoo ;) )
> when they've gone down.
> 
> Not exactly conclusive, I know, but a satisfied customer testimonial. It
> does what it says on the tin ;)

Another satisfied customer:

- I run a desktop at home with 3 heads

- Each head uses an nVidia card, two are PCI, one AGP

- It took me a day and a half to get this lot working together,
  finally by switching to the open source driver, which worked
  first go (GNGNGN! fscking closed-source drivers!)

- Mindful that hardware fiddling occasionally casuses crashes, I
  switched to ext3 immediately before attempting to install the
  additional cards. OBTW, my 40GB drive has a swap partition and
  a root partition; I am not a fan of fine-grained partitioning.

- During my fiddling, the machine wedged solid approximately 30
  times.

- The ext3fs not only did not require a manual filesystem repair,
  the one time that it forced a full fsck (one boot in 20), it
  reported _no_ errors, not even repairable ones (unlinked files
  with non-zero refcounts, etc.).

At around 20 minutes to do a full fsck, this not only saved me
around 10 hours of thumb twiddling (bear in mind that the job
took around 12-15 hours all up), it also prevented what might
otherwise have been a lot of manual repair.

I'm very impressed.

- Raz

P.S. Some time after this, I happened to read the known-bug list
for nVidia's closed-source driver and, would you believe, there
are known bugs with bus management and a combination of PCI and
AGP cards. <sigh>