[KLUG Members] Re: Latest SUSE stability? -- It's always RedHat with Ext3 or XFS for me ...

[Bryan J. Smith]

Quoting Adam Williams <awilliam@whitemice.org>:
> Support for filesystems other than ext2/3.  By "support" I mean the 
> ability to create and manage them with the default installer & tools.

When you talk about file systems and file services, you don't want "features." 
At least this is the view RedHat has.  No other distributor puts their support
behind one filesystem as a reliable NFS+Samba platform than RedHat.  And even
then RedHat has done a great job getting various support in 8.0, which is to be
expected in a .0 release.

Now outside of distributors, there is always SGI and their XFS filesystem.  In
fact, despite other distributors supporting XFS in their installer, SGI itself
_only_ supports XFS on RedHat.  And the feature-set in XFS is pretty unbeatable,
from ACL to official quota support from almost day 1.  They also waited forever
before labelling a version "1.0" even though XFS was more "reliable" on Linux a
good year before that -- let alone is more "compatible" with various kernel
interfaces than IBM's JFS or Namesys' ReiserFS is today!

> Samba with LDAP SAM enabled.  For some reason RH doesn't ship it this
> way,

Then rebuild it from SRPMS.  It's not that hard.

> although sendmail, etc... require the LDAP libs.  But then RH tends
> to ship out of date Samba version anyway.

AFAICT, RedHat "lags" the latest kernel, Samba, NFS, etc... by 1-2 months for
"QA/regression testing" purposes.

> And possibly working ACL support.

I've always preferred SGI XFS for ACLs because, again, it has had them since day
1 on Linux (because it's a direct port from Irix).  They also have their
"xfsdump" that preserves them.  I'm a "dump" bigot.

> That gets me that many fewer things to hack/compile.

I've always found it this simple (since early 2001):
- SGI XFS Installer CD for RedHat
- Samba rebuild from SRPMs with LDAP/ACLs enabled

You only need to do the second once if just NFS install your own RPMset from a
notebook.  That's what I do.  Too easy (and I think you're making this too hard).

BTW, RedHat 8.0 is supposed to ship with ACL support in the kernel and compiled
into Samba.

-- 
Bryan J. Smith, E.I.             Contact Info:  http://thebs.org
A+/i-Net+/Linux+/Network+/Server+  CCNA CIWA CNA SCSA/SCWSE/SCNA
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