whats the difference ?? what is journalisigng ? and ive never used resiser fs whats good about it and bad eytc. and ext3 is installed by default by red hat 7.3 so can some explain so i can choose

also does linux suport a single drive up 80GB im suire it does but not that sure!

so can some one help me !

thanks


snake

Well, as far as I know, ext3 is still considered unstable, or you might want to say "In developement". So, if you use it, you might have once a weird problem caused by a bug. But I am not sure how stable it is at the moment. It seems many people are already using it.
Journaling: (Correct me if wrong): If you're writing something to the disk, it stores sort of a record of what needs to be done in order to finish writing (i.e. looking for storage, writing the data, updating the links etc.) And it removes (does it?) the record once finished. So, if your system crashes when writing data, the filesystem can pick up what it didn't do before crashing. Basically you don't have a long fsck or ScanDisk in Windblows on startup. The repairing doesn't take long.
I really don't know wheter journaling filesystems are faster then others...
I hope you understand what I am saying

I have been using reiserfs for almost a year now no probs.
I use RH 7.2 which does not support it by default.
I installed Redhat under ext3
backed up to another partition as a tar dump.
Boot up with a cd with a kernel 2.4.18 with reiserfs compiled in
(not a module)
reloaded system
All is sunshine.
Mandrake support reiserfs out of the box. On the other hand have not heard of people having problems with ext3.
Whatever you do a would strongly recomend a journaling fs
enjoy!

so waht is the difference ith resiser fS and ext3 ??

and do both of support a single 80.2 gb partitioon ?? or even support that capacity for a drive ??

Snake

OK, very brief rundown of what journaling does. When you reboot your Windows box without going to 'start-->shutdown' (as it the case when you need to reboot due to a crash), you will always be given the Scandisk thing when you restart. There is an almost identical program called fsck under Linux. If you're using ext2, or any other unjournalised system, then you will need to fsck your partitions before you can boot your system (just like Windows). With journaling, you don't.

There is very little to choose between the two. Some quote that one is faster than the other, but which one depends on who you ask. Reiser is technically older than ext3, but since ext3 is almost exactly like ext2 (which is older than Reiser), the tools necessary should everything go badly wrong will definitely be there for ext3.

Yes, they should both support that size.

thnaks m8 !!! for the reply

just one last question now

i will have two ard drives in my linux box one will be a 30gb ibm hard disk the other will be a 80gb

30gb will be used to install the linux os and other software but the /swap partition will be on the 80gb as this way if i am doing something on the smaller hard disk it wont be slowdown byt the computer trying to write to the same drive while im accessing it 9hope that makes sense)

the question i have is i want to use the 80gb drive to store all my mp3's and nackup my work as well this is where i will keep all the stuff which will run on my ftp server, the question i have is i want to be able to acces this drive and alli its contents on windows as well, so i will be using smaba, but the question is can i have the drive in ext3 filesysetm and windows will stilll be able to acces it ? or should i make it fat32 so windows can access it ?

also if i wish to place a tape drive on the win box to backup the 80gb hard disk so can i access all the info and then backit up onto the tape drive using smaba ? do i see the drive as anormal netwrok drive on the windows system ??


anyay here is the way i will make the parttitons

30gb drive

/boot = 100mb
/ = 29gb

dont think i need anything else ? or am i wrong ?

80gb drive
/swap = 2gb

/mp3 = 40gb
/ftp = 30gb
/winaccess = 8gb

is this ok or can anyone suggest any others that i should use like /usr etc.. ?

thanks !

Snake

OK, this whole Samba thing tends to confuse Newbs. Samba does not allow you to access your Linux files from under Windows - it allows you to acces your Linux files from under Windows on another machine over a network. If you understood that already, then I appologise.

If you gonne be using this one machine as a dual-boot (i.e. running both Linux and Windows), then you will need to have the space accessed by both OSs to be formatted at vfat (Linux's name for Fat16/32). If you format it as ext2/3/reiser, then you will not be able to access it under Windows.

Oh, and I think that the sizes for your various partitions are possibly a little on the extreme size:

You'll never need 100Mb for /boot if you're only gonna be using Windows + one distro of Linux.

2Gb of Swap? I've got 256Mb of RAM, and I've never used more than 100Mb of SWAP - even when doing fairly heavy graphics work with Corel Photopaint in Linux.

29Gb for /? I would give / maybe 10Gb, and then the other 20 for /usr, but that's just personal preference. Oh, and if you're gonna be web serving, then you might want a very big /var.

ok let me be a bit more specific that should clear up all the confusion,

i have a dual amd system which i use for my win box (only window 2k pro no other OS/ no dual boot)

i am building a new server which will only have linux running on it! no other os so no dual booting!

now i thought having the swap partiton big isnt taht a good thing ??

right also if i make the root partitin very big e.g 29 gig for "/" the desnt that spead file space for /usr and /var ?? i thought this was the case coz if i used auto parttiton it make my boot partition 50meg and the swap partiton twice the size of my memory and the the rest of the free space was allocated to the "/" root partiton isnt this right ?


so now i have a seperate computer which i will acces over the network so i willl need to use samba !

the question is does it matter what filesystem the drive is so that windows can read from via samba ?

the 80gig will be split as follows:


80gb drive
/swap = 2gb (bigger better in my opinion ?? can anyone confirm this ?)

/mp3 = 40gb (needs to be acces from windows!)
/ftp = 30gb (needs to be acces from windows!)
/winaccess = 8gb (needs to be acces from windows!)

i want to make the filesystem ext3 but i need to know if winows can acces it via smaba or do i ahve to make it fat32 ?


as for partition sizes ? please can u explain furthur ? about why if i give the root opartition the reaming free space it wont be allocated to the rest of the sub directories such as /usr /var ?

thanks

Snake

Does not matter what the fs is for samba. As I said I use reiserfs
looks just like a fat32 drive from win98. Long file names are ok.
winxp thinks its ntfs and works fine.
Same setup as you, one pc all linux 2 pc's windoze.
All my data on linux gets backed up every night.

Sorry dude. Looks like I was the one getting confused over your needs.

The partitions that are going to be shared can be formatted as anything that Linux can read (=anything!). For consistency sake, I would format it either ext3 or reiser, the same as the rest of your system.

Samba is simply a 'layer', if you will. When you network Windows computers together, they don't actually see the filesystem on the remote machine...they all work with the networked filesystem called SMB. Now, Linux, being a Unix variant, natively uses NFS for networked filesharing - so the SaMBa project was born to allow Windows+Linux networking.

Samba itself can be configured by editing only a handful of files in /etc/samba - but I find using the lovely GUI SWAT, or even Webmin make life easier.

Good luck.

thanks for that info, how about the partition sizes etc.... should i just allocate the remaing space to the "/" or should i have seprate /usr or /var ??

Snake

It really depends on how you feel about it. You could quite reasonably give it some swap (but I'm still not too sure about 'more is better' - I originally used the 2xRAM idea, but that's quite outdated (i.e. when computers routinely had <16M Ram), so I just give mine about 150Mb or so), and then set the rest to be /, and let it sort itself out. This would work fine, especially if you run with either ext3/reiser, but you might find problems should you have a power-out...but hopefully not.

If you really wanted to think long and hard about it, then you should put the partition that will be used most (/var if it's a mail server) in the middle (i.e. the fastest part) of the drive.

With regards to Sambaing, you set up specific directories to be shared, so it won't matter how the harddisk is chopped up, so long as the bit you want to share is mounted locally (which it definitely would be if you give all = /).

ok i will have seperate partitions for my mp3 and ftp part of the drive and i do want it to be a mail server but how do i get the /var to be in the middle of the drive ??

and also how big should i mkae the /var ?? 5gb ? is that enough bearing in mind that there will only be 2 of us who will only using it ! ?

Snake

I think 5Gb should be more than enough for only 2 people...the size drive(s) you're talking about are comparitively huge.

How to get /var in the middle? Well, ask yourself...do you really need to? I was talking about if you're gonna be doing seriously high-end mail serving, for a business perhaps. I wouldn't think that for 2 people you'd need to do this. Try just slapping some SWAP and then giving the rest over to /.

With only two people, you shouldn't be putting so much stuff on there to fill your harddrives, unless you're maybe gonna be doing lots of DVD burning/ripping/creating. I'd keep things simple, for now.



Technical answer encase you're interested
You have 100Gb harddisk.
You want 50Gb for /var.
100-50 = 50.
50 / 2 = 25
So, you'd create a partition at the beginning of the drive (using fdisk/cfdisk) that is 25Gb, then you'd create your /var, which is 50Gb, then you'd create another partition that is 25Gb again, at the end...and voila, you'd have a 50Gb partition in the middle of the drive.

ok im not bothere about putting it in the middle but this is how i am going to do the setup if your intrested

i have two drive ok

the 30 GB one will be as follows

/boot = 50
/ = rest of the space

80 gb as follows

/swap = 2gb
/ftp = 30gb
/mp3 = 30
/winaccess = 18gb


i wont need a var ill let the first hard the 30gb one take care of the var for me! and also their will only be two of us on it maximum! this server is only here for educational purposes!

i will be burning cdd's and stuff but thats it ! thanks for the help!

the reason i put the swap on the other drive is because that way it wont interefer with the readiong of the main hard disk!

can u notice any problems ?? if so please let me know!

Thanks!

Snake