Doing a cursory Google scan on journaled Linux filesystems, it seems that the three ground-up journaled FSes: XFS, reiser and JFS all have their separate strong points but all compare favorably. Reiser does a better job with many small files...which would seem to be the reality of maildir formatted inboxes. Any comments on that? Any war stories, that is, any comments on reliability, availability and recoverability of them. Support issues?
Possible down the road orphaning? Is FS quotaing support and does it work well with a lot (for me that means 4000) users? Anybody using IBM's open source JFS?

I currently use AIX and it's been as dependable as a hammer there. In some 20 years with AIX, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that I've had to use fsck. We had one set of machines that would drop hard 2-3x a week due to a bad main electrical trunk splice....2 or 3 years of that and the worst I ever saw was having to BRS once every two months or so. OTOH, I distrust IBM's commitment to the little shop and affordable entry machines: this is fast vanishing in the pSeries/AIX world...or else we wouldn't be moving towards Linux.

Thanks! Feel free to contact me offline if you deem this marginally related to DC.

==== Once upon a time, the Internet was a friendly, neighbors-helping-neighbors small town, and no one locked their doors. Now it's like an apartment in Bed-Stuy: you need three heavy duty pick-proof locks, one of those braces that goes from the lock to the floor, and bars on the windows.... ==== Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Bard College, New York 12504 sdean@bard.edu voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035