On Friday 19 October 2007, Danny Mooney wrote: > I have one computer in the household running Fedora 6 and the one I am on > right now is a Gov XP on a Dell system that I am required to use in my > work. My question is on the Fedora side is there a defrag program that can > be run on Fedora in a schedule or otherwise? Yes, there is a defragmenter for ext2 available. Fedora by default uses ext3; it can be converted to ext2 and defragmented. That being said, it is almost never necessary to defragment an ext2 or ext3 filesystem. I say 'almost' never, because there is one situation where defragmentation can become necessary, and that's when you've filled your filesystem over about 95% full, a situation that in the default install can only happen to root (or a root process), since the filesystem ordinarily has 10% or so reserved for root. In this singular instance, defragmenting can have dramatic results. Unfortunately, the defragger only works on unmounted filesystems, and isn't very good. The standard way of defragging under linux, therefore, is to copy everything to another filesystem, reinitialize the filesystem, and copy everything back. Since usage of a defragger is so rare, a good defragger hasn't been written. The existing one is, creatively enough, called 'defrag.' -- Lamar Owen Chief Information Officer Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute 1 PARI Drive Rosman, NC 28772 (828)862-5554 www.pari.edu
