Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Andrew <afrayedknot AT thefrayedknot.armory.com>]

my sympathies to you. If i may digress for a moment, on some similiar,
though less poignent experiences. My housemate seemed to have decided
that doing sorcery updates, hourly, unattended, through cron, without
holding a many things, on the devel track, was an acceptable thing to
do, he also didnt seem to read the lists often enough to know about the
init.d spell or the /tmp/sorcery-upgrade script to swap everyone away
from sorcery as a spell, and of course if cron is running the updates
he didnt get any of the prompts or info telling him about this. Every
few days across the hallway "sorcery is broken again", "sorcery got rid
of my bootscripts", you get the picture. And of course its always my
fault cause im on the team or something like that, and i have to explain
to him "yes you have to run that script to fix things" or "why dont you
back those up and _then_ recast init.d, and follow the instructions" or
"its in development, dont bet the farm on it for once"

Its a good idea to hold all spells that may have disastrous consequences
on your system if they go away, such as gcc, glibc and xfree86, init.d
is also a good thing to put a hold on, and if nothing else, backup. Of
course you cant really do much about that when it was a spell that
just randomly got added to everyone, and sorcery was taken out of the
grimoire. which is why backups are good.

sgl cd's are simply great to have around since they understand xfs,
and i only have one non-xfs partition, and its fairly easy to chroot
into your sgl partitions and fix things. ive saved myself (and my
housemate) a half dozen times thanks to one of those. one thing i learned
to do when mounting a chroot like that is to do
mount -o bind /proc /mnt/chroot/proc
that way your chroot has a procfs sitting there for you. binding /devices
is also helpful sometimes.

for devfs, im a rebel and mount devfs on /dev over the static devices,
then since i actually run devfsd it adds links for /dev/hd?? so i
never notice the differences. im still not sure why sorcery has two
seperate places for this, at first it seemed nice, then it just confused
things. anyways, it can save things sometimes if devfs doesnt get going
since youre fstab will have /dev instead of /devices, and if you boot up
and devfs hasnt mounted over /dev yet the drives can still mount through
the static devices.  it also makes using a resucue disk easier ;).


anyways, good to hear you got your system going again.

Andrew

> 
> Lessons learned:
> 
> - Mount scripts are important
> - Devfs is important
> - Glibc is important
> - Don't sorcery update unattended
> - Backup more stuff from / onto other hard disks
> - Have sgl CD handy with xfs modules loaded.