[plug] ext3

[Michael Hunt]

Tim wrote:

> What is ext3? Should i change to it? How do you convert to ext3?
>
> also what is RAID?
>
> thanks
>
> TIm

See my earlier post (re: searching the web before asking a question) for
information on getting answers to your questions. Be fore warned, continuing
to post like this is probably not going to get you the answers that you are
searching for and is probably going to annoy the hell out of people who
really should be doing other things (like me for example *grin*)

Still young and inquiring minds like to know how _everything_ works so I'll
let you in on a few of the secrets I know and maybe you can be a fractional
wiser. (Don they still teach fractions at school ???)

Ok you have probably heard it said many times over but I will repeat it here
for those that have short memories.

If you don't know the meaning of a word - Look it up in a dictionary.

The web has some fantastic ones (including computer/technical ones). A
search on google brings up the following:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Computer+Dictionary

And at the top you can follow the link that says:

Category:    Reference > Dictionaries > Glossary > Computer Terms

to get a comprehensive list of computer dictionaries.

Ok now I have done this very thing before and used webopedia because I liked
what answers it turned up. So I bunged the words above that you mentioned
above into it and turned up the following:

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html

Which to summarize basically means that you use multiple Hard Drives in your
computer to increase the speed and reliability of your disk system.

Now ext3 is a Linux term so a search on google brought me to the EXT3 FAQ
(frequently asked questions). Here you'll find the question "What is ext3?"
(http://people.spoiled.org/jha/ext3-faq.html)

Now essentially ext3 is what is known as a journalled file system. This
means that a journal or log is kept of all transactions before they get
written to your drive so that in case the power goes out your drive will be
able to recover with very little chance of lost data. EXT2 is the older
brother of EXT3 and doesn't have journaling. In the case of a power
outage/dirty shutdown you usually have to do a fsck (file system check). In
the case of large 60Gb drives this can take quite some time. In the case of
a proxy server with over a terabyte of disk this can take a _very_ long
time.

Therefore ext3 is _better_ than ext2.

Michael Hunt

(Nick Bannon I know you are out there ready to pounce on my explanation and
I know it wouldn't meet Ted's demanding scrutiny, but it works for me
*grin*)/