Doug,
I'm in the boat with the folks who say read the manual and such. That
said I would like to let you know that in the computer world 1=1 and 0=0 and
1!=0. What that means is a phrase like "remove all partitions" means
exactly that, while "remove all partions on disk Alpha" would only affect
the Alpha disk. This means there is no bug in the software. Other more
"user friendly" software provide prompts because people don't read
carefully, I guess that means the bug is with STDIN of the user? You will
hear many many times to RTFM or RTFB and you must do that. In the GNU/Linux
world applications assume you know what you are doing, in Windows
applications assume you don't (thus the prompts).
To help get you started on backups check out:
man tar Tape Archiver
man gzip Compressor
man rsync Remote Sync (awesome!)
http://www.amanda.org/ (Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver)
man cron (Schedule something to happen)
/B
----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas Alan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2003 14:01
Subject: Re: "Remove all existing partitions"
> Ward William E DLDN <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > Doug, I've read these messages and I've come to a conclusion: You are
> > one of those people who screws up, and then says "I'm the innocent
> > victim! It's somebody else's fault!"
>
> I don't claim to be any sort of "innocent victim" -- I have merely
> noticed the hard way a significant flaw in a piece of software and I
> have reported the problem, in the hopes that the warning might help
> others avoid the same snafu and in the hopes that the software will
> eventually be fixed. (I'm not the only person by the way, who has been
> bit by this issue. An Google search reveals quite a few others.)
>
> That there are people who instead of saying, "Thank you for the heads
> up", and who insist on defending incorrect behavior in important
> software, and to those who are completely unhelpful and feel compelled
> to do nothing more than publicly scold me about doing backups, hey, more
> power to you. You keep me entertained at the folly of ever assuming
> that your fellow human being is likely to actually be any more
> reasonable than buggy software. Just remind me never to give you my
> computer to install an OS on, since apparently you would think that it
> is okay to wipe all my disks, even ones upon which the OS is not being
> installed, and then blame it on me for not telling you not to do that.
>
> > Flat out, you are WRONG with your constant ragging about how Kickstart
> > is messed up; you didn't know what you were doing (because you thought
> > you did, and didn't read the Man pages or the docs to confirm it
> > worked the way you thought) and decided that since YOU wanted it to
> > work in a certain way, it MUST work that way.
>
> I never said how it MUST work. I said how it SHOULD work. Things often
> don't work the way they should. Caveat emptor. Just because things
> don't always work they should, doesn't mean that one shouldn't point out
> when they don't.
>
> > I'm about to be in the EXACT scenario you are mentioning, except for
> > one thing: I need the drive to install the OS on to /dev/hdb, not
> > /dev/hda. I have machines that already have an OS installed, and on
> > THOSE machines, Linux is a guest in a dual boot system. By >YOUR<
> > rational, if I try to tell kickstart to build these systems, it'll
> > blitz /dev/hda and leave /dev/hdb alone.
>
> I never said any such thing.
>
> > Nope, not the right answer. I want it to install to /dev/hdb, and not
> > /dev/hda, so I need to tell it not to blitz the drives, and to install
> > to /dev/hdb.
>
> Right. Kickstart has an option to tell it to preserve Windows
> partitions, making what you want to do easy. In that regard, Kickstart
> did things right. I commend the authors.
>
> > By configuring it BEFORE I start, with knowledge of EXACTLY what I
> > want it to do. Kickstart is only as intelligent as the person who set
> > up the kickstart file.
>
> So, now you are saying I'm not intelligent?
>
> > On the other hand, in a few months, I'm going to want it to blitz a
> > different group of machines entirely; erase every drive, mount the
> > root drive, and allow me to come back later and mount the newly
> > slicked drives (variable to each machine, in that case) where I want
> > them for data (using LVM, I'll probably make them one spanned disk).
>
> And having it automatically "slick" all the drives in the computer is
> really going to save you *any* significant amount of time, considering
> that each such slicked drive is going to require manual configuration
> later?
>
> > Different criteria. But >I< need to figure out exactly what I want
> > with kickstart... it'll do it, but only if I tell it exactly how. And
> > who knows, I might be able to figure out a way to get LVM to create
> > the spanned volume in kickstart without knowing a priori what drives
> > and sizes are available... which means I wouldn't even need to do the
> > LVM by hand.
>
> Well, now *that* would be a valid reason to have Kickstart erase all
> partitions on the computer. Of course, I did not tell Kickstart to make
> an LVM spanning all disk drives. I told it quite specifically to only
> make filesystems on hda.
>
> > A tool is only as good as the person wielding it; in this case, you
> > need to admit the truth and say "Mea Culpa".
>
> I already said "mea culpa" to the department head and she said "mea
> culpa" for not backing up her computer. (Fortunately, there was nothing
> particularly important on the computer.) Now it's time for Red Hat to
> say "mea culpa" about having a flaw in their software and to fix it, and
> for you to say "mea culpa" for not listening to reason.
>
> |>oug
>
>
>
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