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Grex > Helpers > #134: Grex System Problems - Summer 2004 |  |
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| 25 new of 286 responses total. |
jor
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response 139 of 286:
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Aug 28 00:01 UTC 2004 |
no no, we just criticise, no gratitude.
next we'll dock their pay.
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kip
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response 140 of 286:
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Aug 28 01:06 UTC 2004 |
Thanks Jan, that was a very good summary of the events.
As for the "trick" to restoring from tape while booting from the CD,
actually after booting from the CD, you have an option to install a miniroot
system (like a modern Linux rescue disk) to one of the swap partitiions on
the system and then boot from that where you can then create mount points and
start to work with the filesystems and eventually restore from the tape.
A rather nice feature, wouldn't you say?
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janc
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response 141 of 286:
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Aug 28 03:15 UTC 2004 |
I created a mini root, but I didn't see a mount command or a restore
command. I thought that was rather pathetic. Probably I was hallucinating.
That would be just too dumb to be real.
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charcat
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response 142 of 286:
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Aug 28 03:18 UTC 2004 |
Thanks to Kip, Steve, Jan and all others who resurrected Grex! (charcat does
the snoopy happydance!)
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keesan
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response 143 of 286:
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Aug 28 03:27 UTC 2004 |
Jim asks whether the next grex will have more stuff on a bootable CD.
And whether you can do backups to CD or DVD instead of tape.
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gelinas
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response 144 of 286:
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Aug 28 03:44 UTC 2004 |
One advantage of the new machine, which could be put to use on the current
one, is that much of the documentation, and thus the critical files, are
being stored in CVS, on a separate machine.
Yes, backups can be done to CD instead of tape. Backups can also be done
to separate disks. As disk gets cheaper, many folks are finding it makes
more (economic) sense to mirror to disk than to tape or CD.
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janc
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response 145 of 286:
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Aug 28 16:31 UTC 2004 |
Next Grex has lots of extra disk space, part of which is currently configured
as a mirror disk. We don't yet have a CD-R drive for the machine. We should
probably start a discussion of backup strategies for it.
Currently I've got the disks set up so that we can always have two copies of
the OS installed. Each time I upgrade the OS, I replace the older copy with
the new one. Thus it should always be possible to boot Grex into either of
the last two OS versions. Eventually I want to change over to a procedure
where we can install the next version of the OS on the alternate partitions
while Grex is running. Theoretically it should be possible to do an OS
upgrade with almost no down time.
Also, as Joe says we are putting everything needed to build a new Grex into
the off-site CVS archive. My goal is to be able to build and configure a new
Grex, starting from a blank machine with a net connection, in under 24 hours.
So we are checking all the grex-specific code we have into the archive, all
the config files, together with scripts to fetch packages from the net, build,
configure and install them. Of course, user data and and bbs data will need
to be restored from backup.
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albaugh
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response 146 of 286:
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Aug 28 19:31 UTC 2004 |
The one limitation of backing up to disk is that it would still be in close
proximity to the master, so if a disaster struck the pumpkin there would be
no off-site storage to recover from.
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gregb
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response 147 of 286:
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Aug 28 21:54 UTC 2004 |
Why is SunOS used as opposed to Linux or BSD?
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jor
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response 148 of 286:
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Aug 28 23:51 UTC 2004 |
runs on a SUN
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janc
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response 149 of 286:
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Aug 29 03:44 UTC 2004 |
Next Grex runs on OpenBSD.
Grex opened for business on July 18, 1991. Linus Torvald released the very
first version of Linux about two months later. ("Hello everybody out there
using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be
big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.") Somehow, the
founders didn't seem to think Linux was quite ready for the job at the time.
I'm not exacty sure what the situation was with BSD in 1991, but it wasn't
an option the founders were likely to have spent an awful lot of time
thinking about either.
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keesan
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response 150 of 286:
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Aug 29 09:13 UTC 2004 |
So what OS did first grex use? And what hardware?
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remmers
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response 151 of 286:
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Aug 29 14:14 UTC 2004 |
The hardware was a Sun 2, running SunOS (I forget which version).
Jan's right - Linux didn't exist yet, BSD wasn't easily available at low
cost, and we did have access to Sun (which was regarded as the Cadillac
of Unixes at the time).
Times have changed though, and I'm glad we're making the switch to x86
hardware and BSD.
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janc
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response 152 of 286:
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Aug 29 14:56 UTC 2004 |
I think the first open source version of BSD, BSD/386 was also released in
1991. It too would have been horribly inadequate for Grex's needs. FreeBSD,
NetBSD, and OpenBSD were all years later.
I presume that it was SunOS 4.1.3 on the Sun 2. The differences between
that and the SunOS 4.1.4 running on this system are entirely unnoticable.
Mostly bug fixes.
At the time, SunOS was clearly the most stable, most capable version of
Unix available in our price range (probably in any price range). It's
still a remarkably solid piece of software. For me the main reason to
move off it is that too many of the open source packages that we want to
use (like mysql) no longer compile on SunOS.
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dpc
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response 153 of 286:
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Aug 30 14:34 UTC 2004 |
Thanks to Kip, STeve and Jan!
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tsty
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response 154 of 286:
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Aug 30 17:14 UTC 2004 |
nice job ... we all appreciate the efforts and results -thank you
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mfp
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response 155 of 286:
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Aug 31 19:55 UTC 2004 |
Hi, all! I was in Ann Arbor! I ate at the Fleetwood!
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happyboy
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response 156 of 286:
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Aug 31 20:13 UTC 2004 |
i'm sorry.
i use to work there. yuk.
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tod
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response 157 of 286:
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Aug 31 20:18 UTC 2004 |
I used to consume hippy hash served by a tracked up Lisa. The coffee sucked
but they had a torlet so what the hell.
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happyboy
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response 158 of 286:
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Aug 31 20:29 UTC 2004 |
i remember some of the grafitti from the torlet:
"The Fleetwood makes me shit PURE WATER SHIT."
accompanied by a childlike drawing of a screaming
person sitting on a torlet.
the cook use to pork his girlfriend in the storeroom and would
ash his ciggies in the chilipot.
bon appetit!
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tod
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response 159 of 286:
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Aug 31 20:48 UTC 2004 |
We put a arbornet sticker in that torlet..wonder if its still there
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naftee
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response 160 of 286:
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Sep 1 03:38 UTC 2004 |
INSIDE the torlet? Highly unlikely it survived.
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gregb
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response 161 of 286:
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Sep 1 14:47 UTC 2004 |
Getting back to "Grex System Problems..."
In Backtalk, I disabled the "Favorites" items, but my listings are still
being seperated.
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keesan
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response 162 of 286:
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Sep 2 23:16 UTC 2004 |
I am using procmail filter and I turned on the verbose part to figure out why
I get messages about locked filters:
Locking "var/spool/mail/k/e/keesan.lock"
Procmail: Error while writing to "/var/spool/mail/k/e/_w30Ggrex.cybe"
I get several of the above line then it unlocks things, every time. Why?
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gelinas
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response 163 of 286:
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Sep 3 03:09 UTC 2004 |
The error occurs because you don't (and shouldn't) have 'write' access to the
directory /var/spool/mail/k/e/ . The file "/var/spool/mail/k/e/_w30Ggrex.cybe"
doesn't exist.
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