On Fri, May 6, 2005 9:32 am, Peter Farrow said:
Hi There, It seems the default installer with Centos 4, enables DACs and the extra ACLs which DUMP cannot handle.... so I get errors like "DUMP: ACLs in inode #nnnn won't be dumped" since DUMP and RESTORE is integral to my back policy for some 30+ machines I would like to know if its possible to turn off the extra ACLs in the file system as I really don't need them... Can tune2fs do this for me or do I have to re-build the filesystems with some option that I currently don't know...
For Ext3, I have switched to Jorg's STAR because it has done POSIX ACLs for awhile. But when I want to use dump, I have switched to XFS (and its xfsdump), since 2001. You can install with XFS from the installer.
The nice thing about XFS, like Ext3, is that it hasn't changed in structure since the mid-'90s. Unlike IBM JFS, which was ported from OS/2 instead of AIX (largely because of Project Monterey -- see any full and accurate history on the SCO v. IBM lawsuit for more on the reasons why) and lacked a lot of the UNIX/inode structures, XFS was ported directly and fully from Irix to Linux. Which means that POSIX ACLs, Quota, NFS and other things worked off-the-bat in Linux.
In fact, the SGI XFS team was responsible for a _lot_ of the new VFS interfaces of 2.5.3-onward, largely because they had already ported them from Irix to Linux for XFS support. I.e., a lot of the new features of the Linux 2.6 kernel at the VFS that _all_ filesystems benefit from were from Irix's XFS codebase.
As of Linux 2.6 (and late 2.4.25+ kernels?), all of the core support structures that XFS needs are now standard. Other than one bug in XFS 1.0 (fixed some 3 years ago, resulting in the XFS 1.1 release), XFS has been rock-solid and reliable for me. The only major thing that had to change from Irix to Linux was the default block size (to match the default paging of the x86 architecture from MIPS).
-- Bryan J. Smith mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org
On Fri, 6 May 2005 at 1:08pm, Bryan J. Smith b.j.smith@ieee.org wrote
For Ext3, I have switched to Jorg's STAR because it has done POSIX ACLs for awhile. But when I want to use dump, I have switched to XFS (and its xfsdump), since 2001. You can install with XFS from the installer.
The nice thing about XFS, like Ext3, is that it hasn't changed in structure since the mid-'90s. Unlike IBM JFS, which was ported from OS/2 instead of AIX (largely because of Project Monterey -- see any full and accurate history on the SCO v. IBM lawsuit for more on the reasons why) and lacked a lot of the UNIX/inode structures, XFS was ported directly and fully from Irix to Linux. Which means that POSIX ACLs, Quota, NFS and other things worked off-the-bat in Linux.
In fact, the SGI XFS team was responsible for a _lot_ of the new VFS interfaces of 2.5.3-onward, largely because they had already ported them from Irix to Linux for XFS support. I.e., a lot of the new features of the Linux 2.6 kernel at the VFS that _all_ filesystems benefit from were from Irix's XFS codebase.
As of Linux 2.6 (and late 2.4.25+ kernels?), all of the core support structures that XFS needs are now standard. Other than one bug in XFS 1.0 (fixed some 3 years ago, resulting in the XFS 1.1 release), XFS has been rock-solid and reliable for me. The only major thing that had to change from Irix to Linux was the default block size (to match the default paging of the x86 architecture from MIPS).
Unfortunately, Red Hat didn't want to support XFS, and so it is disabled in their Enterprise kernels (and thus Centos 4). I'm a big fan of XFS (5.5TB of formatted space online, another 5.5 soon to go into production), and so I've had to recompiled the Centos kernel to enable it.
As of Linux 2.6 (and late 2.4.25+ kernels?), all of the core support structures that XFS needs are now standard. Other than one bug in XFS 1.0 (fixed some 3 years ago, resulting in the XFS 1.1 release), XFS has been rock-solid and reliable for me. The only major thing that had to change from Irix to Linux was the default block size (to match the default paging of the x86 architecture from MIPS).
Unfortunately, Red Hat didn't want to support XFS, and so it is disabled in their Enterprise kernels (and thus Centos 4). I'm a big fan of XFS (5.5TB of formatted space online, another 5.5 soon to go into production), and so I've had to recompiled the Centos kernel to enable it.
I've understood that XFS is a great filesystem and would like to use it for our 2 file servers. As I'm new to linux administration, I was planning to purchase SUSE to have the XFS filesystem supported for these two machines. But, I really like the Centos distro and community. So, I'm wondering, how hard would it be for me to get this working and to maintain it. Is it complicated to recompile the Centos 4 kernel to enable it? And, what sort of upkeep is necessary as updates become available? I'd appreciate any general and specific information on what's involved to get XFS enabled on Centos 4.
Thanks! Allison
Allison Maury wrote:
I've understood that XFS is a great filesystem and would like to use it for our 2 file servers. As I'm new to linux administration, I was planning to purchase SUSE to have the XFS filesystem supported for these two machines. But, I really like the Centos distro and community. So, I'm wondering, how hard would it be for me to get this working and to maintain it. Is it complicated to recompile the Centos 4 kernel to enable it? And, what sort of upkeep is necessary as updates become available? I'd appreciate any general and specific information on what's involved to get XFS enabled on Centos 4.
Unless you specifically need a feature of XFS that's unavailable in EXT3, you might want to stick with the "standard" journalled file system since you are "new to linux administration." I have never played with XFS or Reiserfs so I can't comment on their merits, but I can comment that EXT3 has been bulletproof for me on many file server installs. And being a lazy creature of habit, I've not felt the need to rock the boat. 8-)
Cheers,
C
I've understood that XFS is a great filesystem and would like to use it for our 2 file servers. As I'm new to linux administration, I was planning to purchase SUSE to have the XFS filesystem supported for these two machines. But, I really like the Centos distro and community. So, I'm wondering, how hard would it be for me to get this working and to maintain it. Is it complicated to recompile the Centos 4 kernel to enable it? And, what sort of upkeep is necessary as updates become available? I'd appreciate any general and specific information on what's involved to get XFS enabled on Centos 4.
Unless you specifically need a feature of XFS that's unavailable in EXT3, you might want to stick with the "standard" journalled file system since you are "new to linux administration." I have never played with XFS or Reiserfs so I can't comment on their merits, but I can comment that EXT3 has been bulletproof for me on many file server installs. And being a lazy creature of habit, I've not felt the need to rock the boat. 8-)
I've heard that it can take a very long time to get an EXT3 system back online after a file system crash; whereas, XFS provides rapid recovery from system crashes. Since we mirror the two file servers (each have an attachment with 2 TB of data), I'm more interested in being able to get back online quickly. Have you had any file system crashes and if so, how long did it take you to get back up?
Allison Maury wrote:
I've understood that XFS is a great filesystem and would like to use it for our 2 file servers. As I'm new to linux administration, I was planning to purchase SUSE to have the XFS filesystem supported for these two machines. But, I really like the Centos distro and community. So, I'm wondering, how hard would it be for me to get this working and to maintain it. Is it complicated to recompile the Centos 4 kernel to enable it? And, what sort of upkeep is necessary as updates become available? I'd appreciate any general and specific information on what's involved to get XFS enabled on Centos 4.
Unless you specifically need a feature of XFS that's unavailable in EXT3, you might want to stick with the "standard" journalled file system since you are "new to linux administration." I have never played with XFS or Reiserfs so I can't comment on their merits, but I can comment that EXT3 has been bulletproof for me on many file server installs. And being a lazy creature of habit, I've not felt the need to rock the boat. 8-)
I've heard that it can take a very long time to get an EXT3 system back online after a file system crash; whereas, XFS provides rapid recovery from system crashes. Since we mirror the two file servers (each have an attachment with 2 TB of data), I'm more interested in being able to get back online quickly. Have you had any file system crashes and if so, how long did it take you to get back up?
No, I've never had a crashed/corrupted EXT3 file system...ever. (knock on wood)
Cheers,
C
On Mon, 2005-05-09 at 14:51 +0200, Allison Maury wrote:
I've understood that XFS is a great filesystem and would like to use it for our 2 file servers. As I'm new to linux administration, I was planning to purchase SUSE to have the XFS filesystem supported for these two machines. But, I really like the Centos distro and community. So, I'm wondering, how hard would it be for me to get this working and to maintain it. Is it complicated to recompile the Centos 4 kernel to enable it? And, what sort of upkeep is necessary as updates become available? I'd appreciate any general and specific information on what's involved to get XFS enabled on Centos 4.
Unless you specifically need a feature of XFS that's unavailable in EXT3, you might want to stick with the "standard" journalled file system since you are "new to linux administration." I have never played with XFS or Reiserfs so I can't comment on their merits, but I can comment that EXT3 has been bulletproof for me on many file server installs. And being a lazy creature of habit, I've not felt the need to rock the boat. 8-)
I've heard that it can take a very long time to get an EXT3 system back online after a file system crash; whereas, XFS provides rapid recovery from system crashes. Since we mirror the two file servers (each have an attachment with 2 TB of data), I'm more interested in being able to get back online quickly. Have you had any file system crashes and if so, how long did it take you to get back up?
It can take quite a long time to get an ext2 file system online after a crash ... it's not the same for ext3 since it is journalized, and normally after power loss under load it recovers fine (most of the time without even needing to run fsck).
That being said, I am working on a kernel that has reiserfs and xfs enabled and reiserfs and xfs tools (and many other things ... firewire support, bttv turned on, etc.) ... hopefully by tomorrow they will be in the centosplus repo for i386 and x86_64 and called kernel-unsupported. It will be different than the kernel-unsupported for CentOS-3, in that it will be a stand-alone kernel and not an add on package.
On 5/9/05, Johnny Hughes mailing-lists@hughesjr.com wrote:
That being said, I am working on a kernel that has reiserfs and xfs enabled and reiserfs and xfs tools (and many other things ... firewire support, bttv turned on, etc.) ... hopefully by tomorrow they will be in the centosplus repo for i386 and x86_64 and called kernel-unsupported. It will be different than the kernel-unsupported for CentOS-3, in that it will be a stand-alone kernel and not an add on package.
Sweet. Please let us know when it's available.
Thanks!
-Ryan
Allison Maury wrote on 09 May 2005 13:20:
(Sadly the following quote's attribution is lost)
Unfortunately, Red Hat didn't want to support XFS, and so it is disabled in their Enterprise kernels (and thus Centos 4). I'm a big fan of XFS (5.5TB of formatted space online, another 5.5 soon to go into production), and so I've had to recompiled the Centos kernel to enable it.
Ironic since that the post-production and film VFX world virtually run on XFS due to throwback to the SGI days, and there can be literally anywhere from hundreds to thousands of Linux installs (mainly Red Hat) with XFS on renderfarms and workstations. Needless to say, we've got work arounds for XFS installs, but it's still a bit of a pain in the bum nonetheless.
I've understood that XFS is a great filesystem and would like to use it for our 2 file servers. As I'm new to linux administration, I was planning to purchase SUSE to have the XFS filesystem supported for these two machines. But, I really like the Centos distro and community. So, I'm wondering, how hard would it be for me to get this working and to maintain it. Is it complicated to recompile the Centos 4 kernel to enable it? And, what sort of upkeep is necessary as updates become available? I'd appreciate any general and specific information on what's involved to get XFS enabled on Centos 4.
Oh, it is a lovely filesystem. This site:
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/
will give you all the info you need on it. As for enabling it in CentOS, I really can't remember if this is possible through a switch on the LILO command line when installing. I don't think anybody has come up with a dedicated CentOS XFS supported installer..
The alternative would be to do a normal ext2 format and install and then convert to XFS later (see SGI site above).
Regards,
Martyn
-
Allison Maury -
Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith＠ieee.org> -
Chris Mauritz -
Johnny Hughes -
Joshua Baker-LePain -
Martyn Drake -
Ryan Lane