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11. Advanced Issues

Linux and related systems offer plenty of possibilities for fast, efficient and devastating destruction. This document is no exception. With power comes dangers and the following sections describe a few more esoteric issues that should not be attempted before reading and understanding the documentation, the issues and the dangers. You should also make a backup.

The techniques described here are rarely necessary but can be used for very specific setups. think very clearly through what you wish to accomplish before playing around with this.

11.1 Hard Disk Tuning

The hard drive parameters can be tuned using the hdparms utility. Here the most interesting parameter is probably the read-ahead parameter which determines how much prefetch should be done in sequential reading.

11.2 File System Tuning

Most file systems come with a tuning utility and for ext2fs there is the tune2fs utility. Several parameters can be modified but perhaps the most useful parameter here is what size should be reserved and who should be able to take advantage of this which could help you getting more useful space out of your drives, possibly at the cost of less room for repairing a system should it crash.


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