A few unrelated questions: GMT vs Local, Monitor problems, Soft-RAID
I recently received a new computer at work, and instead of
re-installing, I took the hard drive from my existing machine and
installed it in the new machine. After making sure it was sitting in the
same place on the same IDE controller, everything worked almost fine
(obviously I needed to change my kernel to use the correct sound/network
drivers and X to use the new graphics card, but that was all
predictable). Linux is great - I wouldn't dare *try* this trick under
Windows!
However, I came across a couple of small issues as part of this upgrade
that I'd be interested in seeing whether anyone can solve...
1) The old computer had the system clock in localtime, and since I now
only run Debian I'd like to switch it to use GMT. Where is this
configured? I know that it gets selected at install-time, but where can
I change it afterwards?
2) When I tried to take advantage of the bigger graphics card and
monitor, my X display started wobbling uncontrollably. The effect is
like using a 40Hz display, except that instead of flashing, it just
wobbles back and forth rapidly. The interesting thing is that I've seen
this effect on the previous hardware too, and had chalked it up to a
poor monitor - but I now have a KDS Visual Sensations 21" monitor which
displays 1600x1200 faster than my video card can even drive it. Any mode
over 1024x768 seems to display this effect, and even 1024x768 does it a
little, but much slower (more like 0.5Hz, so it's like a very
slow-moving underwater effect and easy to get used to). People with
similar (and some with identical) hardware running Windows NT and Win2K
aren't having this issue - I don't dual-boot so I can't confirm that
windows is ok on *my* hardware, but the fact that every component of the
computer except the hard-drive was changed suggests that it may be a
software issue. Has anyone seen this effect and does anyone know how to
fix it?
3) Now that I have 2 huge hard drives on my box I was thinking about
using Software RAID to get a little bit of redundancy in case a drive
goes out. I've been reading the two Software-RAID howtos but they seem
slightly out of date - the 0.4.x version seems to pre-date the stable
2.2 kernel, and the other version claims to only deal with 2.3.x. I am
running 2.2.17-pre6 (the current kernel-source-2.2.17 package from
woody) - which of the HOWTOs, if either, applies? Is Soft-RAID in
2.2.17-pre6 ready for use by a relatively inexperienced administrator?
If I use mirroring, is it going to be at least as reliable as a regular
filesystem in the face of power outages etc? How much special
configuration do I need to do to get it to work (a valid answer to this
would be "the exact amount described in XXX howto" - so long as you
identify which of the two howtos :) )? Is Soft-RAID worth it for a
development machine, or would I be better off just scrapping the idea
and making sure all my important partitions are backed up?
Thanks in advance,
Stuart.
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