Ubuntu security hole? (not super major, but wondering if it is an issue to report)

[Alan McKinnon]

On Tuesday 09 May 2006 13:24, Chanchao wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-05-09 at 11:25 +0100, Dick Davies wrote:
> > IMO you'd be better off using a proper filesystem (that didn't
> > need fsck) for your machine, rather than worrying about this.
>
> You mean like ReiserFS?  Is that one significantly better?  I just
> let Ubuntu decide what to do when installing.

That's a complex question with no clear-cut answer, so let me take the 
time to answer it right (while leaving out reams of boring technical 
stuff).

The average user with an average workstation shouldn't notice any real 
difference between ext3 and Reiser on performance. They are both 
perfectly good file systems and both are mature. The structure of 
ext2/3 is extremely elegant and robust and shouldn't have troubles 
with data corruption caused by the filesystem itself. Same with the 
journal. But, the way it is written the developers want you to fsck 
the thing every so often.

Reiser is way more complex, rather than a straight-forward inode 
structure, Hans went for a highly optimized B+ tree setup. On of the 
advantages is that an explicit fsck every so often isn't needed - it 
makes it's own quick check when mounted and does any needed repairs 
on the fly (the last two columns in fstab must be 0 0 for Reiser - 
few people know this and fewer distros implement it). Reiser has some 
distinct advantages over ext3 in certain use-cases regarding big 
directories with lots of small files, I can never recall the 
specifics but there are many benchmarks out there on google to help 
you decide.

I find in practice that Reiser never gives me problems, but ext2/3 
reasonably often b0rks out on it's fsck check. When I do a real 
repair, I usually find nothing is actually wrong... Every so often I 
have reiserfsck do a major thorough chck which so far has always 
passed 100%

This is illogical - ext3 should be rock steady by now and seeing as 
Theo T'so writes it, it probably is. But there is this real-world 
behaviour. So I'm starting to think the problem is actually with 
crappy shitty modern hardware - *especially* IDE. The engineer-like 
part of me has a gut feel that ext3 highlights the hardware's 
shortcomings while Reiser's implementation manages to side-step this.

But that's just my gut feel. Try Reiser for yourself, see what results 
you get. As with all things computer related, YMMV .


-- 
If only me, you and dead people understand hex, 
how many people understand hex?

Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five