[plug] Ext2/3 Out of Disk space bug + Journals

[James Devenish]

In message <5.1.0.14.2.20030824140237.00bb0d70 at mail.optusnet.com.au>
on Sun, Aug 24, 2003 at 02:06:27PM +0800, Weirdo wrote:
> Can I swear yet? When I run out of disk space it would be nice if I was 
> notified instead of having my data goto /dev/null.
[...]
> Any clues on how to prevent this?

I don't understand (so I become sarcastic)...

1/ How can you be told? Have you loaded the telepathy kernel module and
is it not working as expected?

2/ If you don't want your data to disappear, where do you want it to go?
I assume you have less than 2 Gb of RAM installed, so if your disk is
full and there isn't enough room in memory to keep the data...do you
want your computer to print it onto paper?

> I feel that it is a bug that it doesn't inform you that your data has
> been sent to /dev/null.

Are you saying that your application is informing you, or the kernel
isn't leaving a trace in the log files? If you are talking about the
application, report this to the authors of whatever software you are
using. If the kernel...maybe someone else can answer this.

> Also now I'm on the topic of Ext2/3, what exactly does the journal do
> and how?

It protects the integrity of your filesystem by ensuring that each
filesystem action is logged before applications consider the action to
have succeeded.

<http://www.penguin.cz/~mhi/fs/Filesystems-HOWTO/Filesystems-HOWTO-1.html#ss1.12>