Re: disaster recovery

Craig O'Shannessy wrote:
> Never had a kernel panic?  I've had a few.  Probably flakey hardware. I
> feel safer since journalling file systems hit linux.

The only kernel panic I've ever had was when playing with a development
version of the kernel (2.3.x). Never played with development kernels
since then - I'm a user, not a developer.

All the outages I've experienced so far have been due to external
factors such as (in order of frequency):
  - Colocation facility technicians repatching panels and
    putting my connection "back" into the wrong port
  - Colo facility power failure (we were told they had dual
    redundant diesel+battery UPS, but they only had one, the
    second was being installed "any time now")
  - End user's machines crashing
  - Client software crashing
  - Colo facility techs ripping power cables or network
    cables while "cleaning up" cable trays
  - Hard drive failure (hard, fast and very real - one
    revolution the drive was working, the next it was a
    charred blackened mess of fibreglass, silicon and
    aluminium)

I have to admit that in none of those cases would synchronous vs
asynchronous, journalling vs non-journalling or *any* file system
decision have made the slightest jot of a difference to the integrity of
my data.

I've yet to experience a CPU failure (touch wood!).