On 12/25/18 8:06 AM, Richard Owlett wrote:
On 12/24/2018 05:50 AM, Richard Owlett wrote:...The discussion so far has caused me to wonder if I have been conflating symptoms. I think I've an idea of how to test for that -- more later.Preliminary tests indicate that is likely. I will have to get some new flash drives to track my tests. Linux intrinsically assumes one machine has multiple users. In *MY* case, one user has multiple machines.I also have multiple instances of Debian installed on a physical machine. I routinely want something from another partition - Debian requires root access for that. I'm wondering if some of my chaos/confusion stems from copying data from that partition to a flash drive.
I have had multiple x86 computers since ~1995, each running various operating systems (via multiple-boot, multiple OS drives, and/or virtualization). I also suffered with sneaker-net for many years.
I put my machines on a LAN around ~1997 and added Samba sometime thereafter.I discovered CVS around ~2001 and set up one one machine as a CVS server. CVS allows me to check-in files on one machine with one operating system as one user, check-out those same files on other machine(s) with whatever operating system as whatever user, and then check-in any updates back to the server. CVS takes care of three-way merges, EOL translation, permissions, user and group ownership, etc.. The key is to do a 'cvs update' before I make the first change and a 'cvs commit' after I make the last.
Between networking, Samba, and CVS, I have solved almost all of my sneaker-net use-cases with simple and robust operations. What remains is contrib/ non-free firmware for Debian installs and transfers to/ from non-networked machines.
David