[H-GEN] Linux file server

[Robert Brockway]

On Fri, 2 Jul 2004, Paul Gearon wrote:

> [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
> [ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]
>
> Harry Phillips wrote:
> > I have been considering this myself, so what would you use to image one
> > drive to another each night? dd?
>
> Not being an expert, I'd still suggest avoiding that.  If the first drive
> fails while you're reading from it you've blown away two drives at once.

And if this wasn't enough fun, a bug in XFS has been discovered - if you
open a partiton device file for _read_ (using say dd) while the filesystem
is mounted, XFS will trash all the data on the filesystem for you.  This
was first reported a few months ago on the XFS list.  It has been
acknowledged as a problem and a fix is in the works but I have not seen
any advisory indicting a version with this actually fixed.

So for XFS users, using dd like this is just not an option at the moment.

Rob

-- 
Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert at timetraveller.org, rbrockway at uqconnect.net
Linux counter project ID #16440 (http://counter.li.org)
"The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens" -Baha'u'llah