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172 responses total.

Grex is now converted to hierarchical home directories.

If your account is foo, then your home directory has moved from 
/home/foo (aka /u/foo) to its new location at /a/f/o/foo

The /a is the name of our first batch of home directories. 
All users are on /a (at least for now)
The next two letters are taken from the first two characters of your 
account name. 

This change will speed thing s up a bit, but we don't really know exactly how
much. It will probably not affect you.

If you have an elmrc file, and you have changed some of the defaults, you
may need to reset your defaults (or edit it by hand) so that any full path
names use the same convention. I am changing as many as I can find, but I
don't know how long it will take.

We have tested a lot of things and they all seem to be OK, but we can't test
everything, so keep an eye out for weirdness, and let us know.

If you are an elm user with options which require a pointer to a file
in your .elm/elmrc file, I have changed the full path name to the new format
as dictated by the change in architecture. So you will not need to do it.

I did not change every elmrc file on Grex -- only the ones which were
going to stop working because of this. 

Well I *have* noticed some speed-increase since the change. Then again, there
hasn't been a whole lot of ppl on grex since then. Oh well...

What happens to the mail that arrived between the changeover and when I
updated the .forward? (A period of a few hours.)

This item has been linked from Agora 4 to Helpers 52.

I can see a difference in running du on my home.  Even in ls, I think, but
then there have been fewer people.  du used to take forever, though.

nice change, nice work. ought to speed thigs up - cool.
  
du does seem to be faster, i think.
  
is there still the shortcut to directories?

The elmrc fixes would not have had any effect on incoming mail, but 
would have caused elm to try to crate new directories that it would be 
unable to create.

Unfortunately, if someone was filtering mail using a .forward which 
required that the full path name be spelled out, which is the case for 
Andrew, I think the answer is that it would have bounced mail received 
between the time we reconfigured /home and the time that .forward was 
edited.

Ideally, we would have fixed this in advance before restarting mail. 
I'm sorry we didn't think of it. As soon as I realized this, I did a 
search and found two other users who needed their .forwards edited, so 
I edited them now at least.  Better late than never.

OK, I have now read this three times, and it STILL insists that they're
newresponses. Am I doing something wrong?

Can any fairly strong people help to move a heavy piece of computer
equipment tomorrow (er, today - Tuesday) afternoon, in the interest
of benefitting Grex?  One person needs keys to the Pumpkin (i.e. a
staffer).  The equipment is in Northeast Ann Arbor, moving to
Northwest Ann Arbor, and I'd guess it would take 15 minutes to load
it, 15 driving, and 15 to unload it.  Three people besides me would
probably be the ideal number.  Send me mail with your phone number
if you can help or want more information.

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I guess it's too late to offer to help Rob.  My family celebrates Christmas
German-style, on Xmas eve, so this is one of the rare days when I couldn't
help.

   I just rebooted Grex, to check the new /a hashed disk.  All is well
and happy with it.

   I did the reboot becuase when I tried doing an fsck (program to 
check filesystems) on /a, I was getting some errors.  Now, normally
you'd expect errors when you look at a "live" filesystem--thats perfectly
normal considering that people are doing all sorts of things to files.
But since this was a new disk and all, I was a little paranoid when
seeing the errors and did a reboot to make sure all was well.

   I've been curious as to what hashing has done for Grex's speed too,
but I haven't been able to figure out a way to test it yet.  I do know
that earlier tonight when I was reaping accounts, the actual removing
of the accounts went much faster than it did before.  All in all I think
we have a win here.  Probably not as much as people had hoped, but still,
every little bit that the CPU doesn't have to do is great.

Except for once when there was an unexplained load hike to the 40's, Grex has
been fairly fast for me on the dialins.  Faster than usual.  Granted, the link
is still ssllloooowwwww.

popcorn - if I see an item that I dont wish to respond to I type "pass" or
"p" it's quicker....I type r newresponse to read the newresponses. That's
right isn't it?

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Well, it's working now...I'm all set. :) Thanks

If the problem is that Grex crashed while you were reading, you can turn on
the feature that updates your participation file after every item instead of
after every cf.  It's a little slower, but I use it, and it seems fine.  It
means that if Grex crashes, you only lose the responses you've read in the
current item, instead of the current cf.  
the command is put in your .cfonce (Or typed at any prompt) and is:
set autosave
If you type it, then it only affects the current time in picospan.

   We've had something of a busy day, working on various parts of
Grex, in dealing with the crash problem.  The biggest thing done
was that we're using another SCSI disk controller card, to see if
that changes anything in the overall picture here.  We also tried
replacing a SCSI cable inside one of our disk boxes, but the store
we went to wasn't able to do it after all.

  I didn't get enough people to move the equipment last week.
I'm rescheduling for Thursday, January 2, at 2PM.  Jeff Kaplan
will probably make it, and he has a key to the dungeon.  Can
anyone else help?  Two more strongish people would be ideal.
Send me e-mail with a phone number if you can help, and I'll
give you directions by e-mail.  Once again, it's in northeast
Ann Arbor.  I expect the whole thing, loading and unloading,
to take under an hour.

I'm not strongish, but I'm available.  Count me in.

You meant pumpkin, not dungeon, of course.

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I'm available.  I also have (Will have) keys to the pumpkin.  I'll mail you
too, but since I'm here anyway... :)

  With four people, the "strongish" requirement is reduced a bit :-).
With Kaplan, DanG, RobH, and me, that makes four.  Anyone happen to
have a truck or van they could loan then?  It will fit in a car, but
a bigger vehicle could make loading/unloading easier.

No, Valerie, the Pumpkin is Sacred <g>

I can loan my truck, provided I can borrow a car from somebody to get to work
in.

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Hmm, the new place is too cool/interesting and colorful to have it be
referred to as the dungeon, imho.

what is the pumpkin?????

The pumpkin is the new place where Grex is located.

why do they  call it the pumpkin?

Cuz if they dont' return it by midnight that's what it'll turn into. ;)
eheheh.

cute... hehehe

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It's because when we first showed up, the room was a nice shade of pumpkin
orange, so kami and tsty and a few others painted vines and leaves on the
walls.  So, it looks like a pumpkn. :)

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(Valerie slipped in at 35 before my 36.  Picospan didn't warn me.)

(Picospan never warns you. It just tells you after the fact that
it happened. (Though sometimes is misses and doesn't.))

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss