choosing a file system

[Vincent Fox]

Bron Gondwana wrote:
> BUT - if someone is asking "what's the best filesystem to use
> on Linux" and gets told ZFS, and by the way you should switch
> operating systems and ditch all the rest of your custom setup/
> experience then you're as bad as a Linux weenie saying "just
> use Cyrus on Linux" in a "how should I tune NTFS on my 
> Exchange server" discussion.
>
>   
Point taken.  We can go around that circle all day long but I *am*
saying there are other UNIX OS out there than just Linux and quite
frankly it blows my mind sometimes how people fall into ruts.

Numerous times in my career I have had to switch some application
from AIX to HP-UX, or IRIX to Linux.   The differing flavors of UNIX are
not so different to me as others perhaps.  Particularly when it's a 
single app
on a dedicated server I usually find it odd how people get stuck on 
something
and won't change.  Or they take the safe institutional path and never 
fight it.
Collect your paycheck and go home at 4.

I sleep very well at night knowing the Cyrus mail-stores are on ZFS.
Once in a while I run a scrub just for fun.  No futzing around.

This was no cakewalk.  I was pushing a boulder up a hill particularly
when we ran head-first into the ZFS fsync bottleneck start of Fall quarter.
Managers said we needed a crash program to convert everything
to Linux or Exchange or whatever.  I dug into the bugs instead and Sun
got us an interim patch to fix it and we moved on.  Now as I said it's like
butter and one of those setups nobody thinks about.  There are always
excuses why you will stick with "established" practice even if it's 
antiquated
and full of aches and pains, and I fought that and won.  It seems to me 
there
is no bigger deal than having a RELIABLE filesystem for mail-store and
this is where all other filesystem I have worked with since 1989 have been
a frigging nightmare.  Everything from bad controllers to double-disk
failures in RAID-5 sets keeps me wondering am I paranoid ENOUGH.

I'll be all over btrfs when it hits beta.  I'm not married to ZFS.  But I'm
quite unashamedly looking down my nose at any filesystem now that leaves
me possibly looking at fsck prompt.  I've done enough of that in my career
already it's time to move beyond 30+ years worth of cruft atop antique
designs that seemed tolerable when a huge disk was 20 gigs.