On 02/04/2014 10:35 AM, David Brown wrote:
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It seems odd to have chosen FAT32 in the first place then.

FAT32 is the worst possible choice of a filesystem, except for three
aspects - it is quite simple and can be implemented in a small amount of
code (such as in EFI or a bootloader), it is usable on small disks or
partitions, and it is supported by brain-dead OS's that don't understand
better alternatives (NTFS has journalling, but is a monster to implement
in something the size of EFI).

It's a crap filesystem, but it is the "industry standard" for small
disks and small systems.

If readonly support is only needed, there're some alternative to FAT32.

But I agree FAT32 is well known by the industry standard.

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The most important way to protect your FAT32 system is simply to avoid
writing to it except when absolutely necessary.  If it is mounted
read-only, and only updated when changing grub or updating the kernel,
then just make sure you don't power-cycle your machine at that time.

Well, the problem is that you never know when power failures happen at
least for me with a small server without any power backup.

The answer here is staring you in the face... get an UPS.  A small one
is not expensive - you only need it to run the server for a couple of
minutes.  Even though journalled filesystems can keep their /metadata/
consistency after a power failure, they don't normally guarantee /data/
consistency, and certainly cannot guarantee /application level/
consistency.  You get that from doing a proper shutdown.  And remember
also that after an unclean shutdown, restarts involve long consistency
checks at the raid level and at the filesystem level - an UPS will let
you avoid that.

I understand your point.

Thanks.