Re: Old Possum's book of practical hosts.

abuse@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Anthony de Boer - USEnet) writes:
Chris Suslowicz posted thus:
... The
chimney may be a permanent fixture, as 40GB drives are
difficult to come by these days, ...

What's a used 60-gigger worth to you? Plus reasonable shipping
costs....

Nod. Nobody gets hard for much less than 250 gig anymore.

Finally kitted out the main pr0n server with quad 250s. Nice and
easy, yes? A little mirroring, a little LVM, and you get 500 giggle
bites available, right?

So, OK. First problem. The LVs are happily moving from old disks to
new disks when the whole system wedges.

Turns out, there are some devices which Must Not Be Moved while a
penguin is running. (Silly me. Aches doesn't have any problem doing
crap like that.)

No problem, I'll just boot of the CD and quickly fix it from rescue
mode. It's not like this really takes a whole lot of system support.

Except to have 6 disks on-line at once[1], I needed an extra controller.
'Cause these are all goat-less disks, right? Easy to work with,
right?

Fsck it all, I'd rather wrangle SCSI.

So the stupid machine won't boot from optical disk ANYWHERE when
there's an extra goat-less controller plugged in. Fortunately, a
friend was having issues with optical boot[2] on his formerly-scrap-
and-now-webserver machine, so I already had an old 1.2gigger prepped
with the right boot magic to boot the optical disk.

So then the thing starts throwing checksum errors and dropping into
this quaint mode called "PIO", all because a certain penguin doesn't
prime the device configuration properly.

So get that fixed and get the data moved, and the boot partitions all
set up with the appropriate insect larva spread over the right parts
of the new disks.

So now it fails to boot 'cause Mr. Clever forgot something basic, like
doing the appropriate magic to ensure that the right things were there
to be able to USE an array at boot time. So that's an easy fix, once
I get enough sleep to be able to think about it. (All this wound up
way late at night, 'cause it was easy and wouldn't take long. I
really should start getting worried when I think things are easy and
won't take long.)

Swap everything around, so the new hard disks are on the mobo, and the
extra controller gets to do optical, since it's shown a penchant for
arguing with the penguin[3]. Pull the old disks, 'cause they're now
empty.

Now the stupid thing won't boot from ANY disk. Nothing. No matter
what you pick, no boot.

You absolutely, positively have to have at least one hard disk on the
extra controller, or you cannot boot from the disks connected to the
onboard controller.

Who THE *** comes up with code like that? I hate PCs. Hate hate
hate. No matter how simple it seems, you're always heading down a
slippery one-way ramp into a twisty maze of tiny incompatibilities and
idiosyncracies, all different.

At least this time I hadn't bought a whole new computer by the time I
was done. Last time I tried a simple upgrade, I got a mostly-new
computer (kept the case) and my Mom got a mostly-used computer (new
case).

[1] I didn't think about building the array in a way that would have
required only 4 disks on-line at once until too late. So don't think
about telling me what I should have done in e-mail. It's down, not
across, I know that already.

[2] You can't boot from disabled devices. Duh.

[3] *** Adaptec with a rusty iron spike. Their only contribution to
the stupid card was the silkscreened logo.

--
But it is for a good reason. Not dying on the job is cool.
-- Randy the Random in the Monastery
.