which file system to use

[ubuntu at rio.vg]

Dick Davies wrote:
> On 07/08/06, ubuntu at rio.vg <ubuntu at rio.vg> wrote:
> 
>> Simply put, Solaris is a pain in the ass.  An awful lot of junk depends
>> on other things and it all gets installed and runs on boot for no good
>> reason.  It's like a big tangled mess.  The GNU tools are much better.
>> Who knows, maybe just stripping out the kernel and good things and you
>> can make a decent OS, we'll see.  Keep in mind, though, Solaris supports
>> far less hardware than Linux does.  Sun servers are incredibly
>> expensive.  I had $50,000 machines.  I suspect the drivers are skewed in
>> the direction of the more expensive equipment.
> 
> I'd be right with you up to the last solaris 10 release. Sun have a lot of
> really good stuff out there now, the x86 ports are solid (and a good supported
> amd64 box will cost a tenth of the price you're quoting there) and they seem to
> be genuinely trying to embrace an open source model.
> 
> Packaging is my only reason to choose a linux over solaris these days.

Solaris 10 was, in fact, the last release of Solaris I used.  I moved to
a new job shortly afterwards to a place that was entirely Linux/FreeBSD.
 Sun hardware was always a joy to work with.  Their engineers and design
teams really knew what they were doing.  Sun software, not so much. :)

>> You see, that's the trick about FS's.  You can stamp out 99.9% of the
>> bugs, and maybe only one in a thousand hits it, but for those one in a
>> thousand, their data is toast.
> 
> Sorry, are you trying to say ext3 is more trustworthy?
> I don't see how that follows.

Yes, I'm saying exactly that.  Ext3, built on Ext2, has a very long
track record of data consistency.  ZFS doesn't.  That doesn't mean that
ZFS is crap, or poorly coded, or anything else.  The simple fact of the
matter is that bugs exist in software.  If you run across a bug in the
software that controls your data, your data can be toast.  The longer
the history and the more people that have used it, the lower the chances
of running into that data eating bug is.  That's also one of the reasons
why there are comparatively few filesystems out there.  The benefits of
new software rarely measure up to the risk of completely wiping out your
data.