I just had fun installing a journalling file system and speeding up my server at the same time.
I had a problem where my RAID was taking 10 hours to rebuild. Someone told me reiserfs would solve my problem.
That wasn't the problem though. The hard drive parameters were setup as low as they go. I have 6 - 40GB 7200RPM HD and they were all running without 32-bit addressing and UDMA. It was taking 11 hours to rebuild the array because each drive was running at 2.9 MB/sec.
Through the process of learning how to install Reiserfs I learned how to check and set the HD Params. Very Cool. So Now I have a RAID that will rebuild itself in 30 minutes (Drives getting 27MB/sec now :) in the case of a HD Failure AND a journaling file system to speed access and make my data corruption resistant.
It's amazing how much more difficult it is to do clustering when it's open source. I think it will really mature in a year or so though. Webmin is really becoming the MMC of the Linux world.
I will never suffer a linux box without fast HD's again :)
My next thing is to setup rsync to start doing mirroring in a cluster of web servers on linux.
References I used;
The main page for Reiserfs - how to get and install it
http://www.namesys.com/
Where I found all the OS updates I needed to compile the new kernel with reiserfs.
http://www.rpmfind.net
The bottom of this page to help me get my system back when I screwed up the kernel build with Reiserfs support.
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-5.1-Manual/manual/doc117.html
Here to figure out why it was taking almost half an hour to rebuild the kernel on my PIII 450 and how long it would tak on an Athlon XP 2100 :)
http://www.tomshardware.com
And of course http://www.webmin.com/ which make things a whole lot easier.
More great writing on Journaling file systems
http://www.linux-mag.com/2000-08/journaling_05.html
Leon