You wrote:
Hi all,
Fewer days ago a CentOS box server suffered a manual and unexpected reset (too large to explain: there are silly people in everywhere).
The result was the system did not mount de root (/) partition and the boot process was stopped. I repair it easily: boot from LiveCD (Knoppix in my case), umount root partition and pass the e2fsck utility.
Because of that I've used several fs tools and my surprise was the e2defrag utility. Until the present day I think the ext2/3 fs has not defrag problem. But I've used defrag tools in root partition because it was really fragmented.
What do you know about this kind of "trouble"?
I supose the fragmentation is ext2/3 fs is lesser problem than in Win fs (FAT32, NTFS) but I'm not sure.
DO NOT USE IT. Below is a message from Ted Tso to the ext3 mailing list:
Date: Tue, 31 Oct 2006 14:29:48 -0500 From: Theodore Tso tytso@mit.edu To: "Magnus [utf-8] M?nsson" magnusm@massive.se, ext3-users@redhat.com Cc: submit@bugs.debian.org, brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de Subject: Re: e2defrag - Unable to allocate buffer for inode priorities
Package: defrag Version: 0.73pjm1-8 Severity: grave
On Wed, Nov 01, 2006 at 01:10:50AM +0800, Andreas Dilger wrote:
So now it was time to defrag, I used this command: thor:~# e2defrag -r /dev/vgraid/data
This program is dangerous to use and any attempts to use it should be stopped. It hasn't been updated in such a long time that it doesn't even KNOW that it is dangerous (i.e. it doesn't check the filesystem version number or feature flags).
In fact we need to create a Debian bug report indicating that this package should *NOT* be included when the Debian etch distribution releases.
Goswin, I am setting the severity to grave (a release-critical severity) because defrag right now is almost guaranteed to corrupt the filesystem if used with modern ext3 filesystems leading to data loss, and this satisfies the definition of grave. I believe the correct answer is either to (a) make defrag refuse to run if any filesystem features are enabled (at the very least, resize_inode, but some of the other newer ext3 filesystem features make me nervous with respect to e2defrag, or (b) since (a) would make e2defrag mostly useless especially since filesystems with resize inodes are created by default in etch, and as far as I know upstream abandoned defrag a long time ago, that we should simply remove e2defrag from etch and probably from Debian altogether.
If you are interested in doing a huge amount of auditing and testing of e2defrag with modern ext3 (and soon ext4) filesystems, that's great, but I suspect that will not at all be trivial, and even making sure e2defrag won't scramble users' data probably can't be achievable before etch releases.
Regards,
- Ted
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