On Sat, Jan 31, 2004 at 03:37:01AM -0500, Robert Brockway wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Jan 2004, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>
> > There's no data-integrity issues, but there's certain applications that rely
> > on atime information.
>
> The question is which apps.
>
> I usually mount filesystems noatime but the caveat has always been,
> "watchout some apps require it". I think this has reached the point of
> being unix folk-lore.
>
> I've asked many Sysadmins to name a single app that misbehaves if
> filesystems are mounted noatime and (as far as I recall) no one has yet
> presented a credible example. This isn't criticism of the claim, just a
> genuine request.
im not certain, but i think mutt uses it to determine which mailboxes
listed in the "mailboxes" directive in .muttrc contain new mail.
debian also has a package called `popularity contest' which runs from
cron, looks at installed packages binary files and checks the atime to
see how often they are actually used, then reports back to the
popularity contest server with the results.
> Can anyone name an application which misbehaves or breaks if filesystems
> it relies on are mounted noatime?
see above, atime is used by some apps, and is sometimes useful in
certain cases. it all depends on your particular usage.
--
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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