[GLLUG] Question regarding filesystems

[Charles Ulrich]

On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 1:40 PM, Taylor Burke <tburke1192 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've got a server in my posession that is soon going to be a
> fileserver, and I'm planning on doing as secure an install as I can
> possibly manage. This includes BIOS security, bootloader security,
> encrypted filesystems, etc. Now, my question: I've always used ext*
> filesystems since I started using Linux. Because of this I know next
> to nothing about other filesystems, and I was wondering if there is
> one that would work best for a secure installation, or if it even
> makes a difference. I need something that's fast, reliable, and
> secure, as well as supported by Arch Linux

Unless you happen to have unusual requirements, you're best off with
whatever the distribution chooses as a default as it will generally be
the most stable and the best supported. On Linux, that's ext4.

Filesystems tend to balance (or make deliberate trade-offs) on
performance, fault-tolerance, space efficiency, and sometimes
higher-level storage management features like volume management.
There's not really the notion of "security" when talking about a
filesystem. The filesystem only implements the permissions structures
defined by the OS security model (user/group, mode, ACLs, etc).

Btrfs is coming to many distributions soon, so it will be interesting
to see what that will offer. It's supposed to have many of the nifty
features of Sun/Oracle's ZFS. I'm hoping that it won't have the same
insane memory requirements.

Charles