4 ms·

Just out of curiosity, may I ask for which reason did you use ReiserFS v3 and on what kind of devices?

by afr0ck 3y ago

neoCrimeLabs 3y ago
What reason? Nobody ever asked that. Kinda funny, I was learning about file-system data recovery and forensics around 1999-2000 and was impressed with how much data that could be retrieved from slack-space [1] on hard drives. I had originally learned this on FAT based file systems. Wanting to expand my skills, I built a linux kernel with all the available file systems at the time, including ReiserFS and then created files systems to experiment with. I was surprised to find that there was no slack with ReiserFS. Without getting more long winded, that caused me to take a closer look at it. Put simply it got my attention. By around 2001 I was using it on my personal workstations and occasional laptop. Eventually it even made it onto my personal co-located servers. At the time I had the delusional idea of making my own security-focused linux distribution, so I was re-installing my devices frequently. Probably why I never had an issue with failure. The one exception was one of my co-located servers that I used for version control that was online with reiserfs for almost 2 years without issue. I migrated to a different server and rebuilt that one before it failed. (edit) I almost forgot - Something I did really /love/ about it was that it handled filesystems with many (hundreds of thousands) of tiny files, symlinks, and directories without breaking a sweat. I was using it as a weird document/graph-oriented database for an app I wrote and was experimenting with (2002-ish?). Now I remember its architecture I'm surprised how well it worked considering I was too inexperienced to understand what indexes were let alone how to use them. All other file systems I tried that with would run out of i-nodes and become incredibly slow at a mere fraction of what the reiserfs based version was able to achieve. [1] - https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/slack-space-file-slack-space https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/slack-space-fil...

Just out of curiosity, may I ask for which reason did you use ReiserFS v3 and on what kind of devices?

by afr0ck 3y ago

Just out of curiosity, may I ask for which reason did you use ReiserFS v3 and on what kind of devices?

What reason? Nobody ever asked that. Kinda funny, I was learning about file-system data recovery and forensics around 1999-2000 and was impressed with how much data that could be retrieved from slack-space [1] on hard drives. I had originally learned this on FAT based file systems. Wanting to expand my skills, I built a linux kernel with all the available file systems at the time, including ReiserFS and then created files systems to experiment with. I was surprised to find that there was no slack with ReiserFS. Without getting more long winded, that caused me to take a closer look at it. Put simply it got my attention. By around 2001 I was using it on my personal workstations and occasional laptop. Eventually it even made it onto my personal co-located servers. At the time I had the delusional idea of making my own security-focused linux distribution, so I was re-installing my devices frequently. Probably why I never had an issue with failure. The one exception was one of my co-located servers that I used for version control that was online with reiserfs for almost 2 years without issue. I migrated to a different server and rebuilt that one before it failed. (edit) I almost forgot - Something I did really /love/ about it was that it handled filesystems with many (hundreds of thousands) of tiny files, symlinks, and directories without breaking a sweat. I was using it as a weird document/graph-oriented database for an app I wrote and was experimenting with (2002-ish?). Now I remember its architecture I'm surprised how well it worked considering I was too inexperienced to understand what indexes were let alone how to use them. All other file systems I tried that with would run out of i-nodes and become incredibly slow at a mere fraction of what the reiserfs based version was able to achieve. [1] - https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/slack-space-file-slack-space https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/slack-space-fil...