[ale] Best FS to use when doing unclean shutdowns?

[James P. Kinney III]

On Mon, 2005-07-11 at 14:55 -0400, Claudia Morlan wrote:
> Its purpose is information gathering and will be deployed blindly.  As
> such, once it is installed we will not touch the box until it is
> removed.  This is an embedded device and has no soft-off button only a
> power switch.

Ah, HA! A basic dumb kiosk box.

Make the basic boot section RO (/, /boot, /bin, /sbin). Make the /var a
skeleton that gets populated by a rc.local script.

Put the data collection part on a separate partition. Change the boot
scripts so it is NOT automatically loaded. Force a file-system auto-
repair check on every boot before mounting. Use EXT3 (easy to install
from RedHat and derivatives) or ReiserFS (Mandrake and SUSE) (Debian and
Slackware come with both). Use hdparm to setup no write buffering on the
partition. Use a cron job that runs every minute to perform a "sync" to
keep everything flushed.

Use a second cron job to keep a mirror of the "live" partition as a
backup. In the event the fsck fails for any reason, use the backup
partition to overwrite it with.

Rewire the power switch to only perform a soft-off, controlled power
down and reset.

Alternative #2. Make the data partition append only.
> 
> Thanks. 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of
> Christopher Fowler
> Sent: Monday, July 11, 2005 1:49 PM
> To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
> Subject: Re: [ale] Best FS to use when doing unclean shutdowns?
> 
> On Mon, 2005-07-11 at 13:46 -0400, Claudia Morlan wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > The encrypted partition is currently formatted as Ext2 with loop-AES.
> > It needs to be r/w whenever the system is on.  Is there any better way
> > than we currently have it set up?
> 
> Why does the system have to be hard cycled?
> 
> > 
> > Thanks. 
> > 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of
> > Christopher Fowler
> > Sent: Monday, July 11, 2005 1:38 PM
> > To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
> > Subject: Re: [ale] Best FS to use when doing unclean shutdowns?
> > 
> > On Mon, 2005-07-11 at 13:30 -0400, Geoffrey wrote:
> > > Christopher Fowler wrote:
> > > > Ext3
> > > 
> > > I stand by my statement. :)  Journal filesystems will certainly have
> a
> > 
> > > better chance of recovering lost data, but none of them are perfect.
> > At 
> > > least not as good as a proper shutdown.
> > > 
> > > 
> > 
> > I agree.  He asked the best FS.  In these cases I uses a ext2 in RO
> mode
> > and symlink everything that has to be R/W in a tmpfs.  A pile of work
> > but makes a system that does not barf.
> > 
> > 
> > 
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-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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