On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 05:44:11PM +0200, Bernhard Gschaider wrote:

Hi!

I'm justing in the process of setting up a new fileserver for our company. I'm installing CentOS 5.3 (64 bit) on it.

One of the "problems" with it is that it has a 3.5TB filesystem for the user data which I formatted during setup as an ext3. Now my experience with our current fileserver is that a 0.5TB ext3 filesystem needs approx half an hour to complete (and kicks in every so and so reboots or every 180days). My estimate is that for the larger filesystem (and the faster machine) the fsck would need well over an hour (being optimistic). I dread the day when I have to reboot the server and wait for 2hours or more just because the system thought it would be a prudent thing to check the filesystem.

My question:

• is there another stable filesystem (XFS, ReiserFS ...) in the centosplus-kernel where this could be avoided (fsck is faster) and that is as safe as ext3
• Or would it be better to switch off automatic checking with tune2fs

Yes, you could use XFS. Or, use tune2fs on the filesystem to disable the automatic checking:

# tune2fs -c 0 -i 0 /dev/whatever

See tune2fs(8) for more information. The -m 0 parameter may also be useful as by default 5% of blocks are "reserved" (useful for root filesystems).

Any opinion/experience welcome. I looked around a bit but couldn't find a good answer

Bernhard

PS: Sorry for the stupid question, but I'm only part-time admin and testing this myself would take weeks, I guess

Ray

Bernhard Gschaider wrote:

Hi!

I'm justing in the process of setting up a new fileserver for our company. I'm installing CentOS 5.3 (64 bit) on it.

One of the "problems" with it is that it has a 3.5TB filesystem for the user data which I formatted during setup as an ext3. Now my experience with our current fileserver is that a 0.5TB ext3 filesystem needs approx half an hour to complete (and kicks in every so and so reboots or every 180days). My estimate is that for the larger filesystem (and the faster machine) the fsck would need well over an hour (being optimistic). I dread the day when I have to reboot the server and wait for 2hours or more just because the system thought it would be a prudent thing to check the filesystem.

My question:

• is there another stable filesystem (XFS, ReiserFS ...) in the centosplus-kernel where this could be avoided (fsck is faster) and that is as safe as ext3
• Or would it be better to switch off automatic checking with tune2fs

Any opinion/experience welcome. I looked around a bit but couldn't find a good answer

Bernhard

PS: Sorry for the stupid question, but I'm only part-time admin and testing this myself would take weeks, I guess

If you use ext3 on LVM, you could every once in a while make a snapshot of the fs & do a background fsck on the snapshot.

https://www.redhat.com/archives/ext3-users/2008-January/msg00032.html