[sclug] Well, *that's* not supposed to happen...

[Will Dickson]

Hi all,

Thanks to everyone who replied.

Turns out it was a hardware fault - borken USB hub. Phew!


Re the ensuing discussion about filesystems, the following may be of
interest: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Filesystems/journaled-filesystems.html

To add my ?0.02:

- XFS is fast, but I have read horror stories about what happens if it's
not shut down cleanly - basically it dies horribly with high
probability, even though it's journalled. There seems to be some
consensus that it's good if (and only if) you have a UPS. It is
conjectured that JFS may have similar issues.

- $DAYJOB is in the process of migrating from Reiser3 to ext3, partially
due to concerns about long-term support for R3 (it's an evolutionary
cul-de-sac, and the pool of developers is small), and also because we
agree with Ted T'so that performance is only Job 2 for a filesystem -
data integrity takes precedence.

- Although I haven't done any proper tests, ext3 with data=ordered
doesn't feel any slower than R3, and in one case is much faster: for
some reason, XMMS used to block for several seconds while reading my
music directory, which was odd 'cos it's not *that* big. I changed the
filesystem to ext3, and it doesn't block any more.

Will.