Subject: Re: Finally, success (WAS Re: Mandrake install troubles with DAC960 RAID controller...)
From: Joshua J.Kugler (isd@as.uaf.edu)
Date: Tue Jan 08 2002 - 16:35:47 AKST
On Tuesday 08 January 2002 08:59, civileme wrote:
> > I realize strcmp("install", "upgrade") != 0, but it would be nice if the
> > install routine would look for existing configuration info. I was
> > prepared, so I had written down pertinant info, but it would be nice if
> > install looked for an existing /etc, and gleaned partition information,
> > IP addresses, DNS servers, etc. It would make the install go that much
> > more smoothly.
>
> Well, the first part of that is in place for 8.2 -- we needed a tool to
> compress config files and put them out of the way for a "vandal upgrade"
> which would scrub the old packages and links and reinstall then restore the
> config files. Update between distros is not really very useful and tends
> to leave artifacts. The same can be said about almost everyone's updates.
That would be really nice. I look forward to this. And the option as to
whether or not keep old configs (and maybe which ones) would be nice too.
> > What is the difference between bash and bash1? The importance on bash1
> > says "maybe." Why two? It just seems a bit confusing to users, as there
> > is nothing in the description to differentiate them.
>
> You are not expected to know all the packages--we have 3000 of them in the
> downloadable distro. bash1 is a contriibuted package which is a variant of
> bash that some users felt important enough to contribute.
OK, that's fine. It just that a description to that effect would be nice,
right now the description doesn't differentiate them.
> > kdeutils depends on efax? Really? Why can't I install kdeutils without
> > installing efax? This is a server, after all.
>
> You can, just do it after install and use --nodeps. Some dependencies like
> that occur because we of necessity follow a rule of not packaging the same
> tarball more than once (otherwise imagine the fun in repackaging every time
> a tarball changed), so efax and kdeutils both use something packaged in the
> efax package.
I know I can --nodeps it later, it just that struck me as a bit odd. It just
seemed odd, that's all.
> > There still needs to be some tweaking done on the startup configuration
> > in the install program. I'm sorry, I didn't write everything down, but I
> > know there were several services I selected to start at boot that didn't
> > get included in /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/. I had to symlink them manually.
>
> Well you do have sysVinit loaded so you don't have to do them manually, but
> it is possible they were set for runlevel 5 rather than 3.... I will pass
> that to install team.
They weren't set for runlevel 5, so I'm not sure what happened.
> > Another problem: Today, I discovered my server was not responding at
> > all. No ping, no ssh, nothing. Went to the server closet and was going
> > to login, but there was nothing on the console. Keyboard wouldn't
> > respond. Num lock wouldn't toggle, etc. Ctrl-Alt-Del wouldn't work. Had
> > to hit reset on the box (not something I like to do on a Linux box, much
> > less a server). When it came up, I looked through all the logs, and
> > nothing looked amiss (other than no entries after 12:40AM today). Does
> > this ring a bell, or do I need to start trouble shooting on my own?
> > After bringing the server back up, fsck'ing the partitions, and
> > restarting everything, it was fine. We'll see if it happens again.
>
> System crashes are flabbergasting... Way way outside the experiences of
> QA.
Regarding ACPI, I'm not sure what the BIOS settings are. I'll check next
time I'm in town. I'm beginning to see the advantage of remote screen
transmission. :)
> The only problems even near the crash behavior you described that I have
> seen are Reiser vs postfix or Reiser vs knfsd (nfs). I have taken to
> recommending XFS to nearly everyone as the filesystem of choice for
> servers, ext3 is way way too slow compared to the others... My benchmarks
> put them this way...
>
> ext3 .67
> ext2
> Reiser
> XFS all 3 approximately 1
>
> JFS about 1.3
Yeah, the jury still seems to be out on ext3. I've heard some glowing
reviews, and even heard that it is the fastest of the journaling file
systems. It's certainly the easiest to convert to. :) We'll see.
Thanks again.
j----- k-----
-- Joshua Kugler, Information Services Director Associated Students of the University of Alaska Fairbanks isd@asuaf.org, 907-474-7601
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a23 : Tue Jan 08 2002 - 16:40:12 AKST