Re: If Linux Is About Choice, Why Then ...

[Joe <joe@jretrading.com>]

On Thu, 6 Apr 2017 12:56:51 -0500
David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> wrote:

> On Thu 06 Apr 2017 at 18:02:22 (+0100), Joe wrote:
> > 
> > My what? It's a home server/firewall/mail server. There is no
> > scheduled downtime.  
> 
> Sorry, I misunderstood your use of "some people". I thought they were
> the users that your MTA transfers emails to.

No, that's just the wife. But many people running stable and wanting to
do in-place upgrades are running servers for more serious purposes.
> 
> > I migrated to a new hard drive a few months ago, and that
> > gave me some unscheduled downtime until I discovered what the BIOS
> > was doing with drive naming... it was one of those 'no, this
> > *cannot* be happening' moments where I copied /etc/fstab between
> > the wrong pair of drives, thereby breaking both old and new
> > installations.
> > 
> > It still seems to be unreasonably difficult to use a working
> > installation to install the correct grub information to another
> > drive which is intended to become the new working installation,
> > still a matter of messing around with chroot and a sequence of
> > mounts and unmounts.  
> 
> You're not still using /dev/sda, /dev/sdb, are you?

Not in general, it's nearly all LVM on UUIDs, but when I'm juggling
three drives in and out of a frame and mounting manually, yes. I'm
accustomed to having the drives assigned by position and/or jumper, but
this BIOS is 'helpful' and remembers drives it has seen recently. But
now I know that. The thing is, I'm not a professional admin, and I'm not
doing this kind of thing every day of the week, if I was then all of my
mistakes would be far in the past...

-- 
Joe