Wine and µTorrent can rot an Ext3 filesystem

Note to self: All bittorrent clients are horrid. Some have a bearable stench, others haven’t. And for some reason these days I find all POSIXy clients are despicable to me.

Thus enter µTorrent running under wine. And I start getting these weird filesystem errors that could eventually eat the whole filesystem where there are some really rare and valuable files. I started poking at the problem and discovered that uTorrent has its own disk-cache manager that of course enters in conflict with the Linux one. There you have a testament to the design flaws of the Windows NT VM and the NTFS filesystem. Fortunately you can turn it off.

So I’ve settled on this configuration:

• Linux: 2.6.30 (yeah, a release candite for now), makes Ext filesystems work in writeback journaling mode with write safety.
• Filesystem: Ext3 with write barriers enabled to cover your backside against hardware write cache idiocy.
• wine: A very recent vintage
• uTorrent: The latest wit all disk cache settings disabled.