Last Updated on April 14, 2017 by Dave Farquhar
So what’s so special about this server? It’s running Debian 3.0 on XFS, which is SGI’s industrial-strength journaling file system. It’s faster than ext3, more feature-complete than ReiserFS, and it’s been reliably shuffling bits as part of SGI’s IRIX operating system for the better part of a decade. You know you want it.
You can pick up a 35-meg ISO image that installs Debian and grabs everything else you want off the ‘Net over here.
Hint: If you’re in the habit of putting a small /boot partition at the beginning of your drive (and if you’re not, you should be), make it 16-20 megs if you want to format it XFS. The minimum partition size for XFS is 16 megs.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.