Early/Late
Well, finally dumped ReiserFS and installed GFS. I used CVS, since the 4.0 version of GFS didn't have a patch for Linux 2.4.2. Hopefully that wasn't a dumb idea.
Still, I managed to crash the system while I was copying the data onto the newly-formatted partition -- I probably shouldn't have tried starting up X at the same time :-/ I just hope that GFS works better than Reiser did. At least Reiser actually had a fsck utility, even though it didn't work all that well.. GFS doesn't have a consistency-checking utility, AFAIK. Hopefully, that means that they put some more effort into making sure the code worked right ;-) If not, I only have to walk about a mile to show my distaste to the developers in person.
They do appear to have code for Sparc/UltraSparc systems, so maybe it wouldn't be an entirely bad idea to make a real cluster at work where all of the databases can be on a cluster of disks accessed through a big SCSI bus... Of course, our Sun boxes run some proprietary software, so it probably wouldn't work so well, not to mention the fact that there probably aren't any Linux utilities for managing the RAID arrays..
There's no doubt in my mind though -- if you want to run a clustered system, use Linux.
I'm kind of curious, though -- is GFS a good replacement for NFS? It's a journaled filesystem, and each client needs its own journal, so that may cause some problems. I suppose you could just make a lot of fairly small journals -- 16MB or something (default is 128MB, IIRC). I guess security might be an issue -- if you get a root compromise on a client to an NFS server, it's not a huge deal if you have things set up right. With GFS, an attacker could really do some damage.
'kay -- if any of that doesn't make sense, blame it on me being up way too late once again..
Posted by mike at March 14, 2001 11:38 PM | Old Advogato Diary | TrackBack