Hello everyone. I am currently running Suse 9.2. I am in the process of phasing out my current Windows 2000 Server machine to replace it with the Suse 9.2 box. The purpose of the machine is to act as a local file server (for my home LAN), web server and ftp server. All three servers are to have access to the same files. Probably about 400 GB worth of data. Of course the web/ftp server will have access restrictions.

My question is this.......what is the best configuration of my drives? Ext2, ext3 or reiser? Where should these drives be mounted? Should the mount points be within the user folder (public_html)? Also, when I hooked up one 200 GB drive and formatted it with ext2, there was about 9GB used but I had no data on it. Any ideas?

I appreciate any help. I am trying my best to learn Linux and get away from MS.

By default when you format a partition with an ext2/3 5% is reserved for root. This space is supposed to reduce fragementation and allow root to log on in case the filesystem becomes full. You can use tune2fs to change the setting.

ext3 is good because you can use all of the ext2 filesystem utilities. reiserfs is faster if you have lots of small files.

You can create a common directory anywhere but I wouldn't stick in a /home/user directory.

Almost ... undelete doesn't work. Which would be the
only advantage of ext over reiser :)



Cheers,
Tink

For a network fileserver, resistance to failure wuld seem to be important. When I used ext2, if there was a power failure, or the machine was improperly shut down, sometimes there was filesystem corruption of one sort or another. With ext3 this was reduced, if not eliminated, and now I'm using Reiserfs, and have had no instances of filesystem corruption, of any type. I should think this is an important issue.

The OS, it's binaries and config settings can be duplicated with a little work and an install CD, but the data --That's the important stuff. It cannot be eaily duplicated, unless restored from backup. A robust, fault resistant file system should be important in your situation.

You don't indicate the intended purpose for this system, other than file service. Do you intend to offer all these files to the public? Or will there be a limited number of users? Will the list of files stored on this system grow? Will the general public be able to add new files? will the primary user interface be the user's web browser? or will users have shell access?

There is a recent thread [url http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=270357 Here] that has info about the apache module 'mod_userdir' that might help

jacks4u

Thanks for the correction. Knock on wood I've never had to recover data from linux. However, I can't say the same thing for windows...

I really appreciate all these responses. To answer some of the questions above......the intent of the server is really for myself and a few friends. I want to have accessibilty to pictures, music and other files from anywhere via a web browser or FTP. There will be the occassional upload but usage and traffic is very limited. No more than one user at a time would occur.

Based on these repsonses I think I will reformat using reiser FS.

Now why wouldn't I want to include all the data in a user folder? Where would it be mounted then? I would then have to set up the folder to accept other users to access and write to.

Another thing....forgive this MS mentality below but I would like to see where I am mistaken.

I will have, let's say, 4 drives total. 2 120GB's, 1 200GB, 1 160GB. Does it make sense to make a folder which then has 4 folders titled according to the drive? I assumed I would make the folder the mount point.

Thanks in advance.

You may want to have all those drives appear as a single volume, which you can then mount. If this sounds good to you take a look at LVM http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/

I will echo the previous message, because it really sounds like this is what you are looking for.

jaks4u