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[LUG] More frustrations )-:

 


Another frustrating day with the old upgraded Linux box. Things have gotten harder now and I can't work out why. It used to be simple, easy to understand and open! Now it's complicated - overly complicated and I do wonder if it's now gotten out of hand and the people making & introducing the complications - probably lots of people, each happy with their own little complication, but when you put it all together, it's just mind bogglingly huge and incomprehensible now...

This weekends task - simple enough in the old day - migrate my old 120GB drive to a new 2TB drive. Actually a pair of new 2TB drives running in a RAID10.

Put in the new drive - partition it - huh? fdisk will now no-longer let me start the partition at sector 64. It wanted to start at 2048. Worse, it wanted to align the extended partition at a %2048 sector boundary too.

Now.. I know why this is - it makes it easy to work with the newer drives with 4KB sectors, (which this is) but previously when dealing with them, it's been trivial to do this - I guess now, it's not and people have lost the use of a calculator - dumbing down at the expense of disk space. It's only 1MB or so... (I know, I know. What's 1MB these days, but it's the start, I tell you)

Anyway, hand-crafting a partition table with sfdisk sorted it for me. (Although now cfdisk now won't look at the partition table, fdisk tells me I have a paritition not on a cylinder boundary and thus isn't DOS compatable, even though it's 100% correct as far as Linux cares!)

So fixed that, formatted the partitions and copied the data over. Lilo'd the disk and tried to boot it. Crap. Ah, what's those big random numbers in fstab. UUIDs. So fixed that up (and yes, I actually put in the new UUIDs!)

Bludgeoned LILO into making it bootable and off it went.

Then I tried to add in a 2nd identical drive, used sfdisk to copy the partition over, then went through the runes to install mdadm, and do it properly. Got stuck there. Well stuck. Wasted a long time. Still don't have this sorted - had to uninstall mdadm in the end and ended up copying a lot of data - again.

Then I tried to compile a custom kernel - easy enough, but it doesn't work. It stops halfway through the boot sequence, and right now I can't work out why. I even tried the old kernel & module set from before I did the upgrade - and it didn't work either. Now this is something I've done for years and years - even on my laptops where they still run udev (Debian Lenny), they have a custom kernel with very few modules and no initrd.gz and they work perfectly well. I have a couple of long train journeys tomorrow, (London & back) maybe if I get a power socket I can work out why, but who knows.

All in all, it's been a fairly frustrating experience - the good-side is that the 3 PCs I built recently all more or less "just worked" and following through the published stuff to make DVDs & CDs play was all very fine and good and relatively straighforward - so when you stick to the system, it seems it's fine, but dare to deviate ...

Linux from scratch is looking more and more attractive ...

Gordon

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