Don’t know what a journaling filesystem is? You may wish you did the next time the power goes out in your machine room. We explain what they do and walk you through installing the reiserfs journaling filesystem.
You’re a good system administrator. Your machines and network run smoothly, you back things up, and everything is under control. But what if the power supply and backup power fail on your server? Things could get ugly when you finally restart the system, run fsck to check and repair the filesystems and wait and wait and wait.
Provided, of course, that fsck can repair your hard drive. Hey, you tell yourself, this kind of power failure is a remote possibility and, after all, it’s not a perfect world.
No, it’s not a perfect world; but it would be a little more perfect if you had a journaling filesystem.
For most of Linux’s existence, ext2fs has been its standard filesystem. ext2fs has served long and well, but it is not well-poised to handle the new and upcoming challenges Linux faces in the commercial arena. Because ext2fs is a static filesystem, it does not guarantee that all updates to your hard drive are performed safely. This is a major stumbling block preventing widespread use of Linux as a database server, among other things.
Journaling filesystems are superior to static filesystems when it comes to guaranteeing data integrity and even when it comes to flat-out filesystem performance. Replacing the ext2fs static filesystem…
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