the value of a journal filesystem?

[Steve Kargl]

On Sat, Feb 05, 2005 at 05:30:26PM +0000, Robert Watson wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 4 Feb 2005, Steve Kargl wrote:
> 
> > I'm not sure if this is a ext2fs, ext3fs, or reiserfs, but the 2nd
> > paragraph is somewhat ominious.  The notice does statement whether the
> > damaged filesystems are on other disks or on disks in other machines
> > (ie. nfs mounted). 
> 
> Journalling, as with Soft Updates, relies on generally correct operation
> of the media (i.e., changes are written or not, etc), and is intended to
> protect only against "fail stop" failure modes.  Handling media failure is
> generally a task for RAID arrays, which are intended to mask corruption by
> coercing corruption to "fail stop" on the media.  So the interesting
> question here would be: did their RAID not protect them?  Or did they not
> have RAID?
> 

>From what I've read, redhat replaced a dead disk in a raid array
with a new disk and started a recovery phase.  During recovery,
the filesystems were corrupted.  I have not been able to find
any info on what hardware controller redhat uses (or used :).
gcc.gnu.org has been down for 72+ hours, which seems like a
very long time for such an important site.

-- 
Steve