On Thu, Sep 14, 2000 at 11:51:01PM -0400, Michael Soulier wrote: > So, have you had to reinstall packages? With RedHat/Mandrake, I > would immediately do an rpm -Va to verify everything, but I quickly found > out that several packages would complain about being broken even after a > fresh install, so the information was useless.
yeah rpm -V is largely useless. (rpm period is largely useless.. oops flamebait ;p) > I'm still getting deeper into Debian's packaging tools. for verification there is debsums but not all packages come with md5 lists. > I tried running sync on a cronjob every hour, but it didn't help you would have to run it more often then that, like every 1 or 2 minutes, but that is not really a very good solution. > much. I never understood why Linux seemed so vulnerable to this. I've had > the system crippled for hours with corrupt files while I reinstall > packages. Not since installing Debian, but considering what you've said > here, maybe I've been lucky. the reason is linux uses filesystem caching extensivly, this GREATLY improves filesystem speed but at the cost of reliability in the event of power failures. BSD tends to do caching much less and as a result has a bit more reliability but at the cost of the filesystem being slow as snot (comparing an OpenBSD box i have here to my GNU/Linux boxen) BSD mounts the filesystems in sync mode rather then async like linux does. BSD has been working on something in between called soft updates, i tried it on my OpenBSD box and ended up with corrupted filesystems... if you want your linux filesystems to be safer and are willing to accept the significant performance hit change defaults to defaults,sync in /etc/fstab for your ext2 filesystems. be prepared for things like tar -x and rm -rf to take eons though. (dpkg upgrades take much longer too) your other option is using a Journeling filesystem such as Reiser or ext3 (reiser i think is more mature at this point but still has some serious limitations such as being unsuitable for use on /) everything is a tradeoff. -- Ethan Benson http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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