FW: NICHOLAS PETRELEY: "The Open Source" from InfoWorld.com, Wednesday, November 1, 2000

Wed Nov 1 14:59:55 EST 2000

For those of you wanting something new to try!!!

Oh Yeah!!  I know no more about this subject then what I have read in the
attached note.

Stephen Dawes B.A. B.Sc.
Web Business Office, The City of Calgary
PHONE:  (403) 268-5527. FAX: (403) 268-6423
E-MAIL ADDRESS:  sdawes at gov.calgary.ab.ca

-----Original Message-----
From: OpenSource at bdcimail.com [mailto:OpenSource at bdcimail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 01, 2000 11:15 AM
To: sdawes at gov.calgary.ab.ca
Subject: NICHOLAS PETRELEY: "The Open Source" from InfoWorld.com,
Wednesday, November 1, 2000

========================================================
NICHOLAS PETRELEY:   "The Open Source"    InfoWorld.com
========================================================

Wednesday, November 1, 2000

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IN CASE YOU WONDERED, THE SIMPLE-TO-INSTALL REISERFS
DOES IMPROVE LINUX FILE HANDLING

Posted at October 27, 2000 01:01 PM  Pacific

I DECIDED TO LIVE dangerously this past week and create
a couple of reiserfs partitions on my primary Linux
server. Reiserfs is a journaling file system that
claims to be more efficient than the de facto standard
ext2fs file system at handling many small files and
just as efficient as ext2fs in other cases. I haven't
done any benchmarks yet, but the performance of my Web
cache and proxy seems to have improved dramatically
since I put all of its files on a reiserfs partition.
So consider me a big fan of reiserfs so far.

What I like most about reiserfs is that it recovers
from things such as power failures extremely fast
because it doesn't have to perform the lengthy
consistency checks required by ext2fs.

Some distributions have reiserfs compiled in as a
module. In that case, all you need to do is make sure
you have the reiserfs utilities installed and then
issue the command modprobe reiserfs to load the
module. After that you're ready to format a partition
as reiserfs and start using it.

If you don't have reiserfs compiled into your kernel or
available as a module, fear not. It is very easy to
build reiserfs support into your kernel. Download and
install the source code for the kernel of your choice
(I am using the 2.2.17 kernel).

Then download the reiserfs patch. You can get the patch
at http://www.namesys.com/download.html or any of the
available site mirrors. Put the patch in your /usr/src
directory or the directory immediately above where you
have your kernel source code.

Before you take the next step, make sure that the path
to the kernel source code is /usr/src/linux. If it
isn't, then rename the kernel source-code directory or
create a symbolic link to provide this path. For
example, the default Debian source-code directory
might be kernel-source-2.2.17. In that case you want
to create a symbolic link such as cd /usr/src; ln
-skernel-source-2.2.17 linux.

Now apply the patch. Change to the /usr/src directory
and use the command zcat
linux-2.2.17-reiserfs-3.5.27-patch.gz| patch -p0 to
apply the patch. If you hastily uncompressed the file,
then run the command patch -p0
linux-2.2.17-reiserfs-3.5.27-patch instead.

Now you need to configure your kernel. There are
several ways to do this, but I prefer to make changes
to the /usr/src/linux directory and run make
menuconfig for this step. You'll need ncurses
development libraries installed for this to work. If
you're a hard-core Linux user or want to become one,
just run make config instead. You can also run make
xconfig if you prefer a graphical configuration tool.

You should now notice a reiserfs option in the
configuration process under the topic File Systems.
Select it. I have reiserfs configured as a loadable
module because that makes it easier to fix any
potential reiserfs problems in the future without
having to recompile the whole kernel.

There is another option to enable reiserfs internal
checks. This is really for debugging purposes, so I
strongly recommend that you do not use this option
because it will slow performance of reiserfs.

If this is your first attempt at creating a custom
kernel, you'll need to step through all the options
and make sure your kernel supports everything you need
for your system. It is way beyond the scope of this
column to walk you through that process. I recommend
reading the ReadMe file in the /usr/src/linux
directory for instructions on how to configure and
install your new kernel.

Finally, you'll need to compile the reiserfs utilities
and install them. This is a very simple process. Just
change to the /usr/src/linux/fs/reiserfs/utils
directory and run make dep; make; make install.

Now create a partition that you want to format as
reiserfs. Mark the partition as a Linux file system,
the same way you would if you were about to create a
standard ext2 file system.

Assuming your new partition is /dev/hdb3, you would
then run mkreiserfs /dev/hdb3 in order to format the
partition. This process will overwrite any data you
may have on this partition, so be sure you know what
you're doing. Now mount the partition and get to work!

Nicholas Petreley is the founding editor of LinuxWorld
(http://www.linuxworld.com). Reach him at nicholas.petreley at linuxworld.com.

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THE LATEST IN LINUX FROM INFOWORLD:

* SuSE releases Linux for S/390 mainframe
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http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/10/31/001031hnsuse.xml

* Linux users enjoy customizable interfaces
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http://www.infoworld.com/articles/tc/xml/00/10/30/001030tclinux.xml

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QUOTE OF THE DAY:

"The structural remedy was never my remedy of choice and
is not even today. It was always my preference that the
market itself be the one to rectify the dysfunctions
disclosed by the evidence."

--U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, speaking
about Microsoft.

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/00/10/27/001027hnjackson.xml?1101we
li

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