On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 03:02:35PM -0600, L. V. Lammert wrote:
| > Personally and If I had time I'd want to find out the problem but I'd be
| > wiping and reinstalling from scratch anyway, especially with an unknown
| > cause.
| >
| So, which is it? The attitude 'an upgrade will fix everything' is really
| pretty dumb [though the core folks are certainly justfied as the problem
| is most like not an issue for ongoing development, but that wasn't the
| original question, was it?].
An upgrade doesn't fix everything, nobody said it would. What would
be interesting is verifying whether an upgrade fixes the problem. It
would bring the topic in the realm of supported releases and from
there it may get more attention.
| If something isn't working properly, throwing it away is ***NOT*** the
| best solution! Would you take your car to the junkyard just because you
| have a dome light that isn't working?
You wouldn't download a car.
This analogy with cars didn't work for the entertainment industry, and
it doesn't work for you. Upgrading (especially in the case of
OpenBSD) does not incur a cost outside of the time you need to spend
on the upgrade itself (time you're now spending on debugging and
e-mailing the list). You say you can't upgrade for reasons you don't
want to divulge, so be it. But comparing this to taking a car to the
junkyard makes no sense. And your nonsensical argument doesn't help
your case.
Here's another reason why your argument fails, btw. Replace your dome
light; done. You know what the issue is and you can easily fix it (or
have someone fix it for you). Quite different from your problem with
locate / updatedb where you have no idea why it doesn't work.
| *Especially* in this case since locate is a standard utility with a shell
| script that has not changed between 4.3 & 4.9, and I expect it hasn't for
| 5.0 either. If the system utilities have not changed, then the problem
| must be elsewhere; blowing away a system just because you can't find the
| problem is just plain stupid.
I thought you already know what the problem is: locate doesn't work
for you. What you want is to do is resolve this problem. If
reinstalling the system resolves the issue, then why are you arguing ?
Oh, you want to understand the problem ? Fair enough. So what you
needed (and got) was help on how to debug problems. Sorry, Lee, but
you've been on this list for a long time (you mentioned you were
expecting some of the feedback you were less happy with from your
experience on the list); personally I had expected you would be able
to help yourself in this area. At the very least, it would've been
prudent if you had provided details in your first e-mail that had to
be extruded from you over the course of what is now quite a long
thread (with many off-topic replies from yourself, by the way;
shouldn't you be debugging an issue instead of arguing on the
internet ?).
| Thanks again to those that actually read the original question, .. I am
| continuing to try and resolve the issue.
You're honing skills, that's excellent. Just a bit of a shame you
have so much issues with the "less useful" feedback you're getting.
It's funny that you would answer a question about "what did you
change" with 'nothing' when it relates to a filesystem. Are you
absolutely, 100% positive you did not create any new files ? Or
delete some ?
If I were you, I'd try to look for files with weird names in your
filesystems. Could they have been created recently, perhaps ? Also,
try to figure out if the database really ends at the border between
two partitions (/home and whatever comes next). Is *everything* from
/home in the database ?
find /home | while read FILENAME
do
RES=`locate "${FILENAME}" | head -n 1`
[ "X${RES}" = "X" ] && echo Could not find ${FILENAME}
done
Realize that this provides false positives for files created since
the last updatedb run; make sure to filter those out. Also, any
errors displayed while you run this could be of interest...
Also try to establish if it's really true that only files from /home
are in the database:
locate / | grep -v ^/home
Finally - are your filesystems OK ? Force an fsck run. Not a
guarantee that if you have issues in that area that they are found,
but if it finds something that would also be telling.
Again, sorry Lee, but this is basic stuff I would've expected you to
provide in your first post. Help people help you, even if you're
running code that's several years old. *Especially* if you're running
code that's several years old - you know the mantra here is "upgrade
to a supported release first", so try to put some effort in yourself
(and show that you have).
Paul 'WEiRD' de Weerd
--
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