[lug] Rather disturbing

[Nate Duehr]

On Feb 26, 2004, at 5:53 PM, Zan Lynx wrote:

> On Thu, 2004-02-26 at 17:10, Gary Hodges wrote:
>> Thanks for the comments.  Sure sounds like what you describe is 
>> exactly
>> what happened.  Would ext3 have done the same thing?  I also 
>> discovered
>> that a file I was editing at the time, and had been saved, has
>> disappeared.  This seems to contradict slightly your description of 
>> how
>> ReiserFS works.  I don't know about the availability of patches for
>> ReiserFS for SuSE 9.0.  I certainly haven't applied any knowingly, 
>> but I
>> will look into this.
>
> ext3 uses ordered mode by default, so it writes data to disk before
> updating the meta-data.  That means ext3 won't have strange content in
> the files like what you saw.

I can't find the link but IBM's DeveloperWorks has a nice article on 
journalling filesystems that very nicely explains the different types 
of journalling filesystems at a high level and which filesystems 
support which types of journalling -- it came out a few months after 
ext3 became "standard fare" for most of the Linux distros.

I sure hope they keep paying their authors and recruiting new talent, 
because some of the best Linux documentation I've ever seen (the 
old-school style "teach me the theory BEFORE showing me the commands" 
kind of immersion-learning-style documentation) comes out of IBM 
DeveloperWorks' site.  The authors really do a tremendous job of 
explaining the technology BEFORE explaining the real-world commands and 
examples.  Great stuff.  I miss technical manuals that felt they had to 
teach the theory first and what you might DO with the technology before 
talking about the commands (or worse, being a damn reprint of the man 
pages... oh man does that make me mad to pay for a dead-tree book to 
find out the author didn't actually do any WORK on the silly book... I 
always skim books for this now, as one of my PHP books is over 50% 
reprinted man pages, and it came recommended "highly" by a number of 
people -- ARGGGGH!  I ALREADY HAVE THE DARN MAN PAGES!  What I need is 
help APPLYING that information... Authors are you listening?!)

Sorry I don't have the link handy for the article, shouldn't be too 
hard to find in their Linux portion of the site.  It's a ton of fun to 
dig through there for other Linux gems anyway.  ;-)

Also, anyone know if more editions of Evi Nemeth's Unix System 
Administration Handbook are forthcoming someday?  I love those books 
too and always look forward to purchasing a new copy and seeing the 
changes... especially the icons that show the differences between 
various Unix flavors... ah, that's fun stuff.  But I bet tech books are 
having a harder time selling copies the last couple of years with 
economic times being so much tighter than during the "boom".  I hope 
not so tight that newer versions of older "classics" like Evi's book 
are not "on hold"!

Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com