Re: fsck is dead (was: Some very thought-provoking ...)

Chris Adams (cadams@ro.com)
28 Jun 1999 23:27:18 -0500

Once upon a time, Michael B. Trausch <mtrausch@wcnet.org> said:
>> I talked to someone a few weeks ago who described a system he just sold --
>> 5 minutes of down time costs this customer about $500,000. That means that
>> the 33 minute fsck costs about 3.3 million dollars. Do *you* want to tell
>> this person that fsck is tolerable?
>
>Um, can you say, UPS, and "maintainence"? If proper amounts of both are
>given, the chances of an fsck are almost NONE, in my experience and that
>of *MY* clients. I don't know about anyone else...

Crashes happen. RAM fails, CPUs fail, etc. I don't know about
"maintainence", but maintenance doesn't fix hardware failures, and there
is no way to work around a CPU failure under Linux. ECC RAM can help
protect you from failures there, and you can do RAID for disks and have
redundant power supplies hooked up to multiple UPSs, reducing your
chances of failure, but you cannot reduce the chance to zero.

"almost NONE" is not never and doesn't cut it. Like you said, you don't
know about anyone else.

-- 
Chris Adams <cadams@ro.com> - System Administrator
Renaissance Internet Services - IBS Interactive, Inc.
Home: http://ro.com/~cadams - Public key: http://ro.com/~cadams/pubkey.txt
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.


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