On Fri, 10 Oct 2003 05:17, Pigeon wrote: > On Fri, Oct 10, 2003 at 08:49:26PM +1300, cr wrote: > > On Thu, 09 Oct 2003 03:49, Pigeon wrote: > > > On Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 08:11:53PM +1300, cr wrote:
(snip) > > > > > > > > Are there any downsides to ext3? > > > > > > If you have a filesystem with a dirty journal you MUST try and replay > > > the journal, ie, fsck it, before doing anything else with it. If you > > > forget this you'll probably end up with worse damage than if you made > > > the same mistake with ext2. ext3 can be mounted as ext2 in emergency, > > > eg. if your rescue kernel hasn't got ext3 support, but don't be > > > tempted to mount it read-write. > > > > I think, with my capability for pushing the wrong button at critical > > moments, I might be safer to stick with ext2 then. > > Well, I admit that I found out about this the hard way. But I think > that was when I was running slink; the woody versions of the tools all > seem to spit out warnings if you try and treat ext3 as ext2. > > AIUI running fsck on ext2 will return the filesystem to a logically > consistent state but doesn't guarantee that you won't lose or corrupt > any files - as you've found out. ext3's journalling is a big safeguard > against this. It is unfortunate that power failures are one area where > this safeguard is noticeably incomplete. It seems to me that, since X is running on top of Linux, keyboard input must go to linux first then to X, and therefore it should be possible to program some keystroke combination (e.g. Alt-Ctrl-Backspace, though I still don't know if that works in the event of an X siezure) that would either tell Linux to just kill X or even, in dire emergency, tell Linux to 'unmount all drives *now* and shut down'. This would be handy since in my (limited) experience, X is often a bit shaky whereas Linux is rock-solid. It would also be handy in cases of e.g. monitor failure or video card glitches etc. (I'm running a standalone on a dial-up modem so telnetting in, as someone suggested, isn't really practical for me). But I'm no programmer so I don't know. cr -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
