quarantine release might lose mail?

[Frank Cusack]

On December 16, 2009 10:49:44 AM +0100 Glenn Steen <glenn.steen at gmail.com> 
wrote:
>  If one has
> a ... "lazy"... scheme (like only a big / and a very smallish /boot,
> which is what I'd recommend for most systems these days, due to modern
> HW and filesystem anatomy), the inode reuse problem is a non-issue.

Do you say that because you expect that with lots of free inodes, that
the "next" free one is always used (as opposed to, e.g., how open()
works where the lowest fd is always assigned?)?

On zfs and HFS+ it does appear that a new file always gets the "next" inum.
No idea if that's a guarantee.

On ext3, which I imagine is what "most" folks use, that's not the case:

[root at linux ~]# uname -a
Linux linux 2.6.18-128.el5 #1 SMP Wed Jan 21 10:44:23 EST 2009 i686 i686 
i386 GNU/Linux
[root at linux ~]# for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 ; do touch m; ls -i m; rm -f 
m; done
8184004 m
8184004 m
8184004 m
8184004 m
8184004 m
8184004 m
8184004 m
8184004 m
8184004 m
8184004 m
[root at linux ~]# df . | grep /dev
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
[root at linux ~]# mount | grep `df . | grep /dev`
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 on / type ext3 (rw)
[root at linux ~]#

So for ext3 I would expect that recycling an inode has a high likelihood.

-frank