By now, everyone knows that if you want to make a file unrecoverable, you can't simply delete it - you have to use a tool like 'shred' or 'srm' to overwrite its contents. But a common question is whether this is effective on an ext3, ext4, or other journaled filesystems. This article discusses these filesystems, and whether secure deletion tools work on them.

Thousands concurrent parallel read write accesses over tens of millions of small files is a terrible performance tuning problem for e-mail servers.

You must understand and fine tune all your infrastructure chain, following the previous articles for data storage and multipath on Debian 5.x Lenny.

This article is meant to serve as a guide for migrating a live system from ext3 to an ext4 filesystem, including migration of files to use extents, a major feature in ext4.

It all started with a request for help from Jesper Krogh in one of the first responses to Torvalds's announcement March 24 of Kernel 2.6.29 on the gmane.linux.kernel mailing list.

With the EXT4 file-system having been stabilized with the Linux 2.6.28 kernel, the Ubuntu developers are preparing to adopt this evolutionary Linux file-system update. EXT4 will not replace EXT3 as the default file-system until at least Ubuntu 9.10, but as of yesterday, Ubuntu 9.04 now has install-time support for EXT4.