LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Andrew Halliday <andrew@recalldesign.com>
  To  : David Lloyd <lloy0076@rebel.net.au>
  Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 10:10:45 +0930

Re: Getting Killed by XMMS and RedHat Installer Stupidity

You should CC this to the redhat install maker people ?
I mean, after all, that really is quite stupid (the fstab thing).

AndrewH

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Lloyd" <lloy0076@rebel.net.au>
To: <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
Sent: Friday, June 22, 2001 11:46 PM
Subject: Getting Killed by XMMS and RedHat Installer Stupidity


>
> Grrrr!
>
> I decided that XFS is a good thing and to put it into production on my
> main computer. Reasons:
>
> 1) reliability
>
> It's a journaling file system and it's been in production under IRIX for
> years. This doesn't mean there's no bugs in the Linux incarnation, just
> that the concepts it uses are sound.
>
> 2) speed
>
> It's most definitely faster than ext2 even though I can't get bonnie++
> to say so on my test machine. Let's just say that I know how fast my
> machines went under ext2 and XFS "feels" faster
>
> However, that's not the point of this story.
>
> To install it, I used SGI's pre-made RedHat 7.1 installer disc. This was
> all very well, and my install chugged along quite nicely. Furthermore,
> I'd made sure that I stacked my "X-Capable" monitor onto the machine
> because under a RedHat Install - even if you force it into text - having
> an X setup crash with my oldest monitor sends it into a spin and I can't
> recover.
>
> Lo and behold!
>
> My media is damaged on xmms-devel-some numbers.rpm.
>
> And I can't convince the STUPID installer to continue.
>
> Eventually I think "F!@#$K this" and decide to do a reboot and a linux
> rescue (because it was literally about 2 SECONDS away from the end of
> package install).
>
> Wonders beyond belief! NO linux installations are detected AT ALL :-(
>
> So I fdisk, work out what should be what and start mounting things. It
> didn't help that I'd mixed up /home and /var but I got the system KIND
> OF working...
>
> However, I discovered that RedHat sets up /etc/fstab AFTER (yes AFTER)
> package install and the system came down in one great heap (for the
> second time - by this time I'd thrown my FreeBSD 4.2 disc against the
> wall, thereby breaking it, not because BSD is crap but because it
> happened to be the least expensive breakable things around me).
>
> Nonetheless, after 6 hours of gettting my production system back into
> production it's working. And thankfully, this time I had multiple cpio
> and tar backups of all file systems but /usr which went on without a
> glitch.
>
> <sigh>
>
> Moral of the story: If you're writing an installer make sure that the
> install does the most important things FIRST.
>
> :-(
>
> --
> "And the winner is
>    InUnifiedCanadianAboriginalSyllabics"
> - Larry Wall et al in Programming Perl
>
> --
> LinuxSA WWW: http://www.linuxsa.org.au/  IRC: #linuxsa on irc.linux.org.au
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