From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Apr 14 22:34:17 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail4.nc.rr.com (fe4.southeast.rr.com [24.93.67.51]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3906437B405 for ; Sun, 14 Apr 2002 22:34:13 -0700 (PDT) Received: from i8k.babbleon.org ([66.57.86.84]) by mail4.nc.rr.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.5.1877.687.68); Mon, 15 Apr 2002 01:34:03 -0400 Received: by i8k.babbleon.org (Postfix, from userid 111) id 33D0EBB39; Mon, 15 Apr 2002 01:33:47 -0400 (EDT) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" From: Brian T.Schellenberger To: David Schultz , Gregory Keefe Subject: Re: Softupdates Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2002 01:33:46 -0400 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.3] Cc: Fernando Gleiser , freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG References: <20020414122514.E5464-100000@cactus.fi.uba.ar> <00cc01c1e3ea$03382c70$9865fea9@GPC> <20020414222818.A4463@HAL9000.wox.org> In-Reply-To: <20020414222818.A4463@HAL9000.wox.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-Id: <20020415053347.33D0EBB39@i8k.babbleon.org> Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Monday 15 April 2002 01:28 am, David Schultz wrote: | Thus spake Gregory Keefe : | > 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. | | To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org | with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message -- Brian T. Schellenberger . . . . . . . bts@wnt.sas.com (work) Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . . bts@babbleon.org (personal) ME --> http://www.babbleon.org http://www.eff.org <-- GOOD GUYS --> http://www.programming-freedom.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message