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Grex > Coop13 > #294: Why Grex lost its mail partition | |
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| Author |
Message |
steve
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Why Grex lost its mail partition
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Nov 19 00:43 UTC 2005 |
In the process of making backups of Grex, I bungled it, such
that when I thought I'd backed up the entire /var partition, a
piece was missing, namely /var/mail. The /var/mail parition is
a seperate thing from /var, and when I did the backup for /var
I thought /var/mail was mounted.
Oops.
Because of this we lost all the mail that was sitting there
for people. Perhaps the least affected are the users who use
Grex for mail every day--if you dealt with new mail on Friday
or Saturday before we went down, then you probably didn't loose
much. Sporadic users lost the most, sigh.
I lost mail as well, so I'm afraid I know that bad feeling
when one realizes that mail is lost.
I'm sorry. I bungled that part of the backup.
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| 176 responses total. |
naftee
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response 1 of 176:
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Nov 19 20:02 UTC 2005 |
That's OK, steVE !
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scholar
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response 2 of 176:
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Nov 20 00:06 UTC 2005 |
Speaking of mail,
Did you send any libelous mail about users to anyone this week?
A quote from dearly departed staff member Daniel Cross of the MARINES:
"Steve wrongly sent an email to gmail claiming that polytarp
did something he didn't actually do. He did not retract it even when it
was demonstrated to him that he was wrong. In fact, as I recall, he
argued that he wasn't wrong, despite clear evidence to the contrary."
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tod
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response 3 of 176:
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Nov 20 00:09 UTC 2005 |
Thanks for backing up Grex when you didn't announce it was going offline for
a month.
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scholar
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response 4 of 176:
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Nov 20 00:13 UTC 2005 |
You're welcome, Todd!
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naftee
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response 5 of 176:
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Nov 20 00:16 UTC 2005 |
wasn't it only a week ?
actually, i'm surprised how fast that week went past !
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tod
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response 6 of 176:
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Nov 20 00:17 UTC 2005 |
I actually got alot of things done. THANK YOU!
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scholar
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response 7 of 176:
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Nov 20 00:18 UTC 2005 |
Thanks, Jan!
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ric
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response 8 of 176:
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Nov 21 16:19 UTC 2005 |
(good reason not to rely on email provided by an organization with no paid
employees)
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albaugh
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response 9 of 176:
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Nov 21 19:02 UTC 2005 |
Yes, my mistake. And it will be the last.
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glenda
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response 10 of 176:
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Nov 22 03:16 UTC 2005 |
We have said all along not to keep anything on Grex that you cannot afford
to lose. I don't even keep stuff on my own website without having it backed
up on my home system (and that also gets backed up frequently).
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scholar
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response 11 of 176:
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Nov 22 03:27 UTC 2005 |
That doesn't mean Grex should go out of its way to destroy people's data.
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nharmon
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response 12 of 176:
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Nov 22 03:38 UTC 2005 |
Why not? It would prevent complacency.
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cross
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response 13 of 176:
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Nov 22 03:42 UTC 2005 |
I doubt that grex went out of its way to delete anyone's data. They
just screwed up. Hey, shit happens. That said, every guide to upgrading
*I've* ever read says to backup to stable media first (ie, a tape).
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steve
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response 14 of 176:
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Nov 22 04:57 UTC 2005 |
You think we went out of our way to destroy people's data? You re
delusional.
I agree about stable media -- we had (have) copies of the partition
data in tar files that were stored in two places: Grex's /mirror on
the IDE disk, and a travelstar disk on my laptop which I tested by
ensuring the checksums of the tar files were the same in both places.
If that isn't stable, what is?
My blunder was that I did not check that /var/mail was mounted,
a specific check for that. I won't make that mistake again.
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cross
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response 15 of 176:
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Nov 22 05:03 UTC 2005 |
Regarding #14, First paragraph; Who are you talking to? I said you
*didn't* go out of your way to destroy people's data, just made a mistake.
Were you referring to me, or polytarp in #11? Please specify.
What I was really getting at is that something other than tar should've
been used to do the backups. Like, e.g., dump.
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scholar
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response 16 of 176:
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Nov 22 05:06 UTC 2005 |
I'd like to make it clear that I also didn't say Grex went out of its way to
destroy data.
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scholar
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response 17 of 176:
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Nov 22 05:08 UTC 2005 |
(What I'm trying to say here is that, even though people SHOULDN"T keep
unbacked up data on Grex, fact is they DO and the staff ought to take that
into consideration when they do things, which they obviously didn't do in this
case.)
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steve
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response 18 of 176:
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Nov 22 05:19 UTC 2005 |
Come on Dan -- we all know that you didn't say that. I was responding
to the eternal noise machine that infests Grex these days.
In the case of the error I made, dump would have given the same results.
dump is useful at times, but a tar file you can rip apart with vi to extract
things. No so with dump.
Re #17: if we didn't take into account that people do have data here,
why would we have even bothered to try at all? Really, you comment here
is simply absurd. Grex staff has had a long history of *saving* data on
bad disks, such that disaster was avoided. This is the worst data loss
that Grex has ever had in its 14 year history.
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scholar
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response 19 of 176:
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Nov 22 05:21 UTC 2005 |
And it's because of neglience.
YOUR negligence.
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steve
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response 20 of 176:
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Nov 22 06:06 UTC 2005 |
You really are having fun, aren't you.
Well, I can't expect anything else from you. You don't have the
ability to be creative, constructive or helpful. You simply snarl
at things.
As pissed as I am about you, I feel more compassion in the end:
you are a sad unhappy person.
Please continue. It is all you can do.
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mcnally
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response 21 of 176:
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Nov 22 06:14 UTC 2005 |
Are there *any* restorable backup tapes of /var/mail?
I had personal messages going back a long way in my spool file
and some recovery would be better than none. I'm sure there are
other people in the same boat.
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steve
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response 22 of 176:
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Nov 22 06:22 UTC 2005 |
There will be some backups on 8mm tape, which are pretty old.
I'd say at least a year? I have the tape box. I'll look for
the latest tape that mentions /var.
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cross
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response 23 of 176:
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Nov 22 13:22 UTC 2005 |
Regarding #18; Just clarifying.
However, dump *wouldn't* have given the same result: dump works by
interpreting the filesystem data on the raw disk devices itself, which
means that it doesn't have to be mounted (in fact, it's somewhat better
if it *isn't*). And you *can* rip apart a dump file to pull things out
with, e.g., a text editor.
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steve
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response 24 of 176:
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Nov 22 17:24 UTC 2005 |
Right, but since /var is seperate from /var/mail, dump wouldn't have
included it. Given the choice of tar or dump for tearing apart, I'll
take tar. It also has the advantage of working on Windows systems. I
should have said "not reasonably" with dump. This gets more into
philosophical areas. The problem was I made an error overlooking
the partitions and I don't think my error would have been different
with dump.
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