OT: journalling file systems (fwd)

[Cheryl Homiak]

I'm putting this onlist because I tried to send directly to David and got 
"relaying denied"; I have no idea why.


-- 
Cheryl

"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2004 20:26:00 -0500 (CDT)
From: Cheryl Homiak <chomiak at charter.net>
To: David Csercsics <david at really.isa-geek.net>
Subject: journalling file systems

What exactly did you want to know?
I'm running debian, of course, not slackware, though I might try out slackware 
on one of my two computers eventually again. I used zipspeak when I was first 
learning linux.
anyway, I have journalling running (ext3) on both my computers. first I had it 
on my desktop but went back to ext2 for a while because you can't run "recover" 
with ext3. But it isn't like I need that very often so when I changed my laptop 
to ext3 I also changed my desktop back. I like it because you don't have to go 
through fsck if your power goes down or for some reason you have to shut off 
precipitously. I do have fsck set so it will run once in a great while, since 
the man page suggested it wasn't a good idea to never have it run but I don't 
have to worry every time an accident happens that fsck is going to leave me 
with a bunch of  inodes somewhere to sort through or with damage i have to fix 
manually.
Is this what you wanted to know or were you talking about something else to do 
with journalling?
You don't have to unmount partitions to do it, though some of the howtos say to 
do so and some say not to do so. Here's what I did:

1.  I made sure that ext3 was compiled into my kernel; I did keep ext2 around
but only as a module as I've heard that if you also keep it built in to the
kernel it will try to mount you ext2 anyway--don't know whether that's true or 
not.

2. I think I then rebooted so I was running the kernel with ext3 support in it; 
don't remember for sure if that was necessary but it couldn't hurt.

3. I did tune2fs -j /dev/hda1
and so on through all my partitions except of course for swap and the dos 
partition on my desktop.

4.  For each partition I ran:
tune2fs -c 0
so fsck wouldn't try to check according to the number of boots.

5.  I ran
tune2fs -i 180
so it would run fsck every 180 days.

6. I changed my ext2 partitions in /etc/fstab to ext3.

7. I  rebooted.

Usually you can see by running dmesg if things are mounting ext3 or by 
scrolling up at the login prompt and looking at the prelogin screens.
Maybe I shouldn't have written all this without finding out what you actually 
were asking, but if it's not relevant i can keep it around in case I have to do 
it again and can't remember what I did.

-- 
Cheryl

"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."