Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2002 01:33:46 -0400 From: Brian T.Schellenberger <bts@babbleon.org> To: David Schultz <dschultz@uclink.Berkeley.EDU>, Gregory Keefe <keefeg@keefeg.com> Cc: Fernando Gleiser <fgleiser@cactus.fi.uba.ar>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Softupdates Message-ID: <20020415053347.33D0EBB39@i8k.babbleon.org> In-Reply-To: <20020414222818.A4463@HAL9000.wox.org> References: <20020414122514.E5464-100000@cactus.fi.uba.ar> <00cc01c1e3ea$03382c70$9865fea9@GPC> <20020414222818.A4463@HAL9000.wox.org>
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On Monday 15 April 2002 01:28 am, David Schultz wrote:
| Thus spake Gregory Keefe <keefeg@keefeg.com>:
| > Looking at DJB's claim again up top, I suspect that he desires his
| > software to really "mean it" when it responds to a client saying it
| > successfully received mail. And the best definition of "mean it" in
| > this context is that the mail is safely written to disk (I'd
| > personally go a step further and have it safely written to a cluster
| > of servers' disks, but that's certainly not reasonable for most
| > environments). If softupdates indeed compromises that feature,
| > though, then couldn't a faint shadow of doubt be cast over the
| > reliability of the entire default install?
The fact that the default install enabled write caching is a much more
serious issue in terms of reliability, I should think, and neither is a big
problem unless you don't have UPS/backup.
Well, ok, softupdates can be a problem with panics and write caching cannot,
but panics aren't at all likely if a system is doing is usual operations, and
if you are "fiddling" with the system (which is whan a panic is likely to
occur if ever), you shouldn't be doing it while the system is "live" if
reliability is so important--you should be running the live server off
another machine.
|
| Cluster of servers? How often do you expect your mail server to lose
| power or crash? It isn't the end of the world if a busy mail server
| loses a few messages per year due to crashes. By extension of your
| argument, you could say that cars kill people, and therefore it's best
| to live far from cities and walk everywhere. Granted, I'm sure you
| could come up with a situation where a more conservative approach than
| softupdates is appropriate, but people who manage such important data
| probably don't use the default install.
|
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--
Brian T. Schellenberger . . . . . . . bts@wnt.sas.com (work)
Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . . bts@babbleon.org (personal)
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