[OpenAFS] fileserver on etch may crash because ulimit -s 8192

[Russ Allbery]

Jose Calhariz <jose.calhariz@tagus.ist.utl.pt> writes:

> I don't know what happen.  I have only two leads.  One IO error
> message from reiserfs on the begin of everything.  And after the loss
> I found a strange behavior with the hardware RAID5.  I need to do
> further investigation.

> And most important I learned I don't know enough about reiserfs guts.
> So I really don't understand the error messages from reiserfsck.  I
> will move into ext3, that I know very well, or XFS, I have a local
> expert that can to help in case o trouble with XFS.

The experience with a lot of people with ReiserFS is that it's great and
fast until something goes wrong, and then it's a disaster.  At this point,
the file system also has a questionable future, and the kernel developers
are leery of it.  That's enough to make me want to go somewhere else for a
file system.

> I remember see an online presentation from an AFS workshop were XFS
> was considered best than ext3 for /vicep partitions.

My personal take on file systems is that smallish differentials in speed
aren't worth worrying about compared to robustness and reliability, so I
tend to run the most mainstream, most widely-used file system on whatever
platform I'm using rather than try to squeeze a bit of additional
peroformance by running something a bit more edgy.  Right now, ext3 is the
middle of the road and I think the safe choice.

XFS is a lot better than ReiserFS, though, in terms of support and
knowledge by the kernel developers, and would probably be fine.  It is
faster for a lot of usage profiles than ext3.

> Thank you.  I didn't know about that file.

Documentation for CellAlias has been missing for a long time, but it's
getting there slowly.

> Ok, I have by default "ulimit -c 0".  I don't depend on core files for
> so many years I forget about ulimit -c 0.  Now I am a sysadm not a
> programmer.  I only program in bash and install gdb for other people to
> use, not for myself :-)

Right.  :)  I got caught recently the same way, actually.

> Thank you for your help on this issue.

Certainly.  I wish I knew more concrete details about what could have gone
wrong.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>