[governance] Re: DNSsec and allternative DNS system

[Karl Auerbach]

Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

> And most Unix systems in production today use a journalized file
> system, with no need for fsck ever. I was very surprised by Karl's
> message, too, because it displayed an unusual lack of knowledge of the
> technical issues involved.

I run ext3 - a journaled file system - on nearly all of my machines. 
And if anybody ever tells you that it never suffers from file damage and 
needs to be repaired - well my own experience runs much to the contrary.

As they say: In theory, theory and practice are the same, in practice 
they are not.

And even in theory, ext3 - the journaled file system that I use and that 
is perhaps most common on Linux machines - is not immune from file 
system corruption.

Here in Santa Cruz, a place where electrical power is more of a luxury 
rather than a utility, we get used to machines being zapped due to power 
outages (longer than a UPS can handle) or, whats worse, long sequences 
of sags, short drops, and pops.  So we get pretty used to machines going 
down - and so we get to experience all the woes of machines that don't 
want to come back up.  I get to deal with a crashed file system about 
twice a week (usually at 2am, sigh.)

Lost (electrically damaged) drives are common (and thus RAID 
verification and rebuilding are unfortunately more familiar than one 
would like) and damaged journaled file systems - ext3 - are quite 
routine problems on my machines.

Usually an e2fsck -y will deal with it - a 20+ minute job on a typical 
500gig drive [multiply that time by three if the RAID underneath is 
rebuilding].

But sometimes the file system corruption is even beyond fsck.

Indeed I have even had, on occasion to fire up the really serious tools, 
like Knoppix - because the damage was such that the OS itself couldn't 
even get started - and sometimes even "debugfs" - when the file checkers 
can't handle the flaw that was created.

		--karl--
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