[Debian-uk] OT: What's required for a debian based small business server?

[Joel Merrick]

On 4/5/07, Simon Waters <simon@technocool.net> wrote:
> Joel Merrick wrote:
> >
> >> I've been meaning to write a Debian specific "How To" on implementing
> >> similar functionality with XFS without the drawbacks. It isn't hard, but
> >> I felt the need to make it "obvious".
> >
> > That's very interesting.. Is this down to XATTRs on XFS itself or is
> > it some other implementation, just running on top of XFS (and
> > applicable to EXT3 or JFS/Reiser etc...)?
>
> My understanding is that XFS has the best snapshot implementation with
> regard to doing snapshots of active filesystems. As I said I want to
> write it up, to force me to research such points, such as if that is
> actually the case or just some errant idea I picked up from an XFS bigot
> (I'm a ReiserFS user for most of my systems, but then most aren't trying
> to use snapshots).
>

Ahh, I see. It's possible to snapshot using LVM (1) (something else
that I learnt today!).. XFS just has extra tools to freeze the
filesystem first. (2)

It seems as though you just freeze using xfs_freeze and then snapshot
the system and then unfreeze.

This looks really useful, not only for the project above, but a lot of
implementations already out in the wild.

(1) http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/snapshots_backup.html
(2) http://arstechnica.com/articles/columns/linux/linux-20041013.ars