Re: 6TB partition, Data only 2TB - aka When you haven't hit the "usual" problem

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On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 2:05 PM, Austin S. Hemmelgarn
<ahferroin7@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 2016-01-09 16:07, cheater00 . wrote:
>>
>> Would like to point out that this can cause data loss. If I'm writing
>> to disk and the disk becomes unexpectedly read only - that data will
>> be lost, because who in their right mind makes their code expect this
>> and builds a contingency (e.g. caching, backpressure, etc)...
>
> If a data critical application (mail server, database server, anything
> similar) can't gracefully handle ENOSPC, then that application is broken,
> not the FS.  As an example, set up a small VM with an SMTP server, then
> force the FS the server uses for queuing mail read-only, and see if you can
> submit mail, then go read the RFCs for SMTP and see what clients are
> supposed to do when they can't submit mail.  A properly designed piece of
> software is supposed to be resilient against common failure modes of the
> resources it depends on (which includes ENOSPC and read-only filesystems for
> anything that works with data on disk).
>>
>>
>> There's no loss of data on the disk because the data doesn't make it
>> to disk in the first place. But it's exactly the same as if the data
>> had been written to disk, and then lost.
>>
> No, it isn't.  If you absolutely need the data on disk, you should be
> calling fsync or fdatasync, and then assuming if those return an error that
> none of the data written since the last call has gotten to the disk (some of
> it might have, but you need to assume it hasn't).  Every piece of software
> in wide usage that requires data to be on the disk does this, because
> otherwise it can't guarantee that the data is on disk.

I agree that a lot of stuff goes right in a perfect world. But most of
the time what you're running isn't a mail server used by billions of
users, but instead a bash script someone wrote once that's supposed to
do something, and no one knows how it works.
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