Topic: Future of e-smith and Journaling FS

[Judy Morgann]

Hi all,

we want to replace all WinNT/2k Server at two of our customers, each company needs 5 Server for Mail-, Fileserver and PDC for domain logon.
Now the question is if there is a way to use a journaling filesystem like ReiserFS or XFS?
The other questin is if the future of e-smith/Midel is securce eg to get support the next two years... The situation today seems bad today where more and more good linuxcompanies are dying.

tia and happy new year!

judy

[Julian Luton]

I imagine that this will happen when the e-smith guys move on to a Red Hat 7.2 base. The reason being that 7.2 uses the ext3 journaling file system.
I for one think that this should be a priority.
All the best
Julian

p.s.
http://www.redhat.com/support/wpapers/redhat/ext3/

[Rob Hillis]

Julian Luton wrote:

> I imagine that this will happen when the e-smith guys move on
> to a Red Hat 7.2 base. The reason being that 7.2 uses the
> ext3 journaling file system.

Part of the "problem" (if there is one) is that SME still uses the 2.2.19 kernel.  The journaling file systems do not integrate very well with these kernels, especially if software RAID is being used.

> I for one think that this should be a priority.

It is a priority for Mitel, just a very low one.  To move to the 2.4 series of kernels involves a lot more work than you might think - various packages break, and some are not easily replaced by 2.4 kernel equivalents.

There is a bit of work being done by non-Mitel developers to cleanly move SME to a 2.4 series kernel, but at this stage, I don't know what's resulted.