[ale] Best FS to use when doing unclean shutdowns?

[Christopher Fowler]

On Mon, 2005-07-11 at 17:00 -0400, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> Ah, HA! A basic dumb kiosk box.
> 
> Make the basic boot section RO (/, /boot, /bin, /sbin). Make the /var
> a
> skeleton that gets populated by a rc.local script.
> 
> Put the data collection part on a separate partition. Change the boot
> scripts so it is NOT automatically loaded. Force a file-system auto-
> repair check on every boot before mounting. Use EXT3 (easy to install
> from RedHat and derivatives) or ReiserFS (Mandrake and SUSE) (Debian
> and
> Slackware come with both). Use hdparm to setup no write buffering on
> the
> partition. Use a cron job that runs every minute to perform a "sync"
> to
> keep everything flushed.
> 
> Use a second cron job to keep a mirror of the "live" partition as a
> backup. In the event the fsck fails for any reason, use the backup
> partition to overwrite it with.
> 
> Rewire the power switch to only perform a soft-off, controlled power
> down and reset.
> 

I like this idea.  You can also reformat the FS storage if it gets
beyond repair.  It all depends on how valuable the data is.  If the
reason for HDD is because there is so much data but losing it is not a
problem then you could reformat on failure to clean and mount.