As long as you are all right with a little downtime of the EC2 instance (in a few minutes), it is possible to extend the root partition on a running EBS boot EC2 instance, without needing to start a new instance.

Here’s a good document on file system analysis. As mentioned from this document: The aptly named UNIX Filesystems: Evolution, Design, and Implementation is only giving a general overview of how things work. Practical File System Design with the Be File System by Dominic Giampaolo is an [...]

After a long time running, your file systems may bacome rotted. There would be so many abnormal files, like pipes, sockets and damaged links, etc. But no warries please, they are only  file system with some common isssues, what you need to do are often 3 steps:

Is there any way to retrieval creation time for a specified file in Linux/Unix environment? Basically,  you can not do that! By default EXT2/3 and Reiserfs do not hold the creation time, but only the last modified time. so if the file has been modified you’ll not find the created time. That means [...]

Some time ago ext4 was released and served as a built-in feature in linux kernel mainline. Ext4 provides additional benefits compared to ext3. The next release of Fedora, version 11, will by default use ext4 unless serious regressions occured. In this article I’d give you a general way on converting [...]

The Journaling Block Device layer (JBD) isn’t ext3 specific.  It was designed to add journaling capabilities to a block device.  The ext3 filesystem code will inform the JBD of modifications it is performing (called a transaction). The journal supports the transactions start and stop, and in [...]

In storage environment, the file system reliability is almost a common issue. As for my understanding, when a ext3 file system is under use, its integrity is keeping broken day by day, as most of the threaded applicatons cannot take fully control of data blocks. After a long time running, fsck becomes [...]

In some sort of problems, ext3 goes read-only to protect the filesystem against further damages. What could cause such a readonly problem? It’s difficult to get an exact answer, but I’m inclined to take it as a file-system issue, though some hardware problems will trigger this error as well.