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Re: the thing with the binary zeroes

To: linux-xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: the thing with the binary zeroes
From: martin f krafft <madduck@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2005 11:38:30 +0100
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also sprach David J N Begley <d.begley@xxxxxxxxxx> [2005.02.14.1116 +0100]:
> The fact that this issue keeps being raised demonstrates that
> either those asking the questions (myself included) are not using
> the right words or those answering are too quickly skimming the
> questions, missing the underlying point and thus answering some
> closely-related but different question.

Well spotted and stated.

> (a) people's expectations of XFS are misaligned with XFS' intended work
>     environment, in which case the documentaion needs to be updated to
>     include a prominent notice in order to correct people's expectations
>     (eg., cannot use XFS and expect minimal data loss unless apps are
>     written a certain way, full hardware RAID is used and UPS guarantees
>     no power loss);

Is this actually a recommendation? It makes perfect sense, but
I have been using XFS on every workstation, including laptops, with
success for years now, and I can usually warmly recommend it. Should
I maybe stop doing so, considering that XFS seems to be more of
a data center filesystem than one for the workstation or "casual
server"?

> If by "old crud" you are referring to the old version of
> a rewritten file (where the metadata has been updated but the
> associated file data has yet to be flushed to disk from RAM), then
> it should be possible to make the zeroing of files an option for
> those willing to carry the security risk (and thus kill the whole
> problem/questions in a simple step).

Just give a tool to root that can recover the data shadowed by the
zeroes. That's not a security hole. And it's as optional as it can
get.

-- 
martin;              (greetings from the heart of the sun.)
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