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Re: No swap on my Debian Sid system



On Mon, Jan 23, 2006 at 12:00:01PM +0000, A J Stiles wrote:
> And that is *good* -- a crashed system has to be dealt with there and then, 
> and is not going to keep limping along, possibly making matters slowly worse 
> and worse; as I have seen happen in practice with old, legacy systems.  After 
> all, if your swap partition is corrupt, how do you know it's the only thing?

No, mdadm sends the admin an email or other alert to tell them a problem
exists, while the machine continues to do its job without data loss.
You can then do a clean shutdown, saving all data, closing all open
files, and not loose anything.

Crashes are NEVER good, unless your cpy/ram is broken and could corrupt
data.  A failed disk in a raid is not corrupting anything, while a crash
is likely to.

> While I think it's generally good to keep a server up as long as possible, I 
> also believe there are times when it needs to come down for damage 
> limitation.

Crashing causes damage.  clean shutdowns do not.  Heck if you think the
system should shutdown asap on disk failure, have mdadm call poweroff on
disk failure, but do not make the system just crash due to not having
swap on raid.

Len Sorensen



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