[olug] UPS

[Phil Brutsche]

Dude, your clock is like 6 hours off!

William E. Kempf wrote:

> Well, I'm running the latest ReiserFS available on Gentoo.

You should be relatively safe.  Any halfway decent MDA will use fsync()
on the files in your Maildirs to guarantee that your email is flushed to
the drive(s), and I seriously doubt your Portage tree is worth the
trouble to save if it's corrupted.

> I didn't know that ReiserFS had issues like this. What FS would the
> OLUG crowd recommend? This machine is used a lot for software
> development, but the most FS entensive use is e-mail (for which
> there's a lot of traffic), using Maildir format.

It depends on whether speed, or data safety, is a concern.  ext3 with
the default of ordered data writes is one of the safest, but is far the
fastest.

XFS, JFS, and until recently Reiser3 (ReiserFS v3, as opposed to the
recently released v4, which is a whole other ballbark) all journal only
the metadata, with varying levels of data safety.

In recent 2.6 (>= 2.6.6) kernels ordered writes have been implemented in
Reiser3 and are turned on by default.

Personally, I use ext3, mostly because of the ordered writes issue
(didn't know about Reiser until I looked earlier today).  I have been
playing with XFS, mostly because it seems to handle LVM filesystem
snapshots better (when using vanilla 2.4.x kernels most file systems,
including ext3 and ReiserFS, needs vfs locking patches).

>> A 1.5kVA APC SmartUPS (according to my sources approx $440, your 
>> results may vary) is pretty cheap protection, especially since you
>> can run as many 4 or 5 computers off it and still get good battery
>> life.
> 
> And $440 is the full cost of both the computers that could be connected to
> a UPS system.  Too pricy.

I'm more accustomed to protecting more expensive (or just plain more)
systems :)

> I'm considering the Back-UPS ES 725 Broadband, for around $90.

I use them a lot at work for protecting desktops.  Great little units.
I have an older 525VA unit that will last 20 minutes during a power
outage - it's got a PII-400 plugged into it (no monitor).

-- 

Phil Brutsche
phil at brutsche.us