From gedetil at cs.umanitoba.ca Thu Aug 6 14:31:30 2009 From: gedetil at cs.umanitoba.ca (Gilbert E. Detillieux) Date: Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:31:30 -0500 Subject: [RndTbl] Fwd: User Group News: Help O'Reilly by Answering this Survey Message-ID: <4A7B2F92.7090000@cs.umanitoba.ca> FYI... -------- Original Message -------- Subject: User Group News: Help O'Reilly by Answering this Survey Date: Thu, 6 Aug 2009 11:15:39 -0700 From: Marsee Henon If you would like to view this information in your browser, click here . O'Reilly Forward this announcement Hi there, Can you share this survey with your members if you think they'll be interested? If you've used our popular programming Cookbooks, you know just how useful they can be in helping you solve all kinds of programming problems. (And if you haven't used our Cookbooks, check them out on our website . You can download sample recipes by clicking on specific book titles and selecting "Sample Recipes.") We've received many requests for videos that present the Cookbook recipes step-by-step, so we recently created 4 sample clips that are available online. Now we're eager to gather your feedback. All you have to do is watch the sample video and tell us what you think about it. When you complete the survey, we'll automatically enter you into a special drawing.* Three winners will receive the opportunity to select a collection of O'Reilly ebooks valued at up to $200. *The drawing will be held on August 19, 2009. The winners will be notified via email. If we don't hear back from a winner within 14 days, the prize will be awarded to another survey respondent. Winners will have 90 days to make ebook selections. For more information, go to training.oreilly.com/videosurvey Until next time-- Marsee Henon Spreading the knowledge of innovators oreilly.com ... Forward this announcement . ... O'Reilly Media, Inc. 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472 (707) 827-7000 From gedetil at cs.umanitoba.ca Thu Aug 13 16:58:16 2009 From: gedetil at cs.umanitoba.ca (Gilbert E. Detillieux) Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 16:58:16 -0500 Subject: [RndTbl] Fwd: USENIX HotPar '10 Call For Papers Now Available Message-ID: <4A848C78.10903@cs.umanitoba.ca> FYI... -------- Original Message -------- Subject: USENIX HotPar '10 Call For Papers Now Available Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:48:18 -0700 From: Lionel Garth Jones The Program Committee for the 2nd USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Parallelism (HotPar '10) invites you to submit position papers. HotPar '10 will bring together researchers and practitioners doing innovative work in the area of parallel computing. HotPar recognizes the broad impact of multicore computing and seeks relevant contributions in all fields, including application design, languages and compilers, systems, and architecture. We request submissions of position papers that propose new directions for research of products in these areas, advocate non-traditional approaches to the problems engendered by parallelism, or potentially generate controversy and discussion. Submissions are due January 24, 2010. More information and submission guidelines are available at http://www.usenix.org/hotpar10/cfpa We look forward to receiving your submissions! Sincerely, Geoff Lowney, Intel David Patterson, University of California, Berkeley HotPar '10 Program Co-Chairs hotpar10chairs at usenix.org From shawn at wallbridge.net Wed Aug 19 10:25:24 2009 From: shawn at wallbridge.net (Shawn Wallbridge) Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 08:25:24 -0700 Subject: [RndTbl] Giant Computer Garage Sale (some Free!!) Message-ID: <8373855F-F928-4F41-B4D3-CE364A7A85A0@wallbridge.net> As many of you know, I have quite the collection of computers (Sun, SGI, Alpha's, PC's), but now that I have moved to sunny California, I cant keep all of them. So, I need to sell off/give away most of them. If you want to see what I have, please give me a call (323 420-5817), or feel free to stop by this weekend from 9am till 6pm (425-70 Arthur St, but you will need to call so I can let you in). Feel free to forward this to anyone you think might be interested. thanks shawn From ummar143 at shaw.ca Wed Aug 19 10:59:41 2009 From: ummar143 at shaw.ca (Dan Martin) Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 10:59:41 -0500 Subject: [RndTbl] disk cloning and bad blocks In-Reply-To: <8ce1230f0907232242s4998b5e7xae5a81e34145d097@mail.gmail.com> References: <4A382ED6.1050107@gmail.com> <4A383215.8080600@shaw.ca> <932088F8-2D40-4816-BE08-28665EF3127A@tinfoilhat.ca> <4A38C603.3040408@gmail.com> <81E30BEC-9BEF-44CD-9397-A3CAFC16597A@shaw.ca> <4A6946A6.7060802@cluenet.org> <8ce1230f0907232242s4998b5e7xae5a81e34145d097@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4A9A7F53-7204-443D-966B-F2E2D74AFEF1@shaw.ca> > Further to my adventures attempting to clone the boot drive of my Mac ... I attempted cloning using dd - the idea being that a block copy would avoid any issues with metadata that might be encountered using file transfers. I/O errors were encountered (I believe a read on the source drive was cited). CCC failed in block mode, and subsequently defaulted to file mode in spite of copying between identical types of drives. Then it failed in file mode. SuperDuper (copies in file mode only) appeared to have no difficulty - though the target drive would not boot until I did it a second time. I have since made more copies which appear to boot. Given previous failures, I am not sure how much to trust that I have a faithful reproduction of the source drive (not that I have any other real choices). I assume there is(are) bad block(s) on the source drive. Given the size of modern drives (this one a Seagate 750GB), statistically I expect bad blocks. In general, shouldn't bad blocks be hidden by the firmware on the drive? I thought there was an internal mapping mechanism on the drive to exclude the use of bad blocks, which was invisible to even low level use such as the dd command. Failing this, such as 'when good blocks go bad', the filesystem (HFS+ and I presume most other modern filesystems) will catalog any known bad blocks to avoid using them for files. Should I be trying to return a warrantied drive after read errors occur? Discard it if it is not warrantied? If the filesystem has isolated all bad blocks on the source drive, then dd conv=noerror should work so long as there are no bad blocks on the target drive. Does conv=noerror pad the missing/unreadable data so that the ends of the source and data drive/partitions 'line up'? HFS+ stores important info in the last 2 sectors. After cloning, how do you verify identical file contents between clones? After a file level copy using SuperDuper, a comparison using FileMerge shows that many files do not match (I booted to one, so Spotlight data will differ). I think FileMerge complains about identical identifying data between the clones that it is asked to compare, though there is no problem mounting identical clones. Since I happened to be at an Apple Store in Minneapolis, I purchased DiskTools Pro, which is advertised to "fix bad sectors" - identifying which files are affected by them. I am not sure how much to trust it, especially with destructive operations like defrag. I hope to try the "fix bad sectors" soon. Does anyone have experience with DiskTools Pro? Dan Martin GP Hospital Practitioner Computer Scientist ummar143 at shaw.ca (204) 831-1746 answering machine always on From kevin.a.mcgregor at gmail.com Wed Aug 19 17:18:35 2009 From: kevin.a.mcgregor at gmail.com (Kevin McGregor) Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 17:18:35 -0500 Subject: [RndTbl] disk cloning and bad blocks In-Reply-To: <4A9A7F53-7204-443D-966B-F2E2D74AFEF1@shaw.ca> References: <4A382ED6.1050107@gmail.com> <4A383215.8080600@shaw.ca> <932088F8-2D40-4816-BE08-28665EF3127A@tinfoilhat.ca> <4A38C603.3040408@gmail.com> <81E30BEC-9BEF-44CD-9397-A3CAFC16597A@shaw.ca> <4A6946A6.7060802@cluenet.org> <8ce1230f0907232242s4998b5e7xae5a81e34145d097@mail.gmail.com> <4A9A7F53-7204-443D-966B-F2E2D74AFEF1@shaw.ca> Message-ID: <6756caf10908191518m43404aacna8c19020cd3f5e8c@mail.gmail.com> My understanding is that modern hard drives detect bad sectors and substitute ones from a set of 'spares', but when they run out of spares, well... time to get a new drive. Replace it on warranty if you can, but either way, the drive is done for. If you can do a file-based backup more than once, you can checksum the files and compare the checksums to see if the copies are good (or at least failed in the same place), but yeah, it's hard to tell how trustworthy the data is at that point, hence all the urging to start doing backups before this happens. Kevin On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 10:59 AM, Dan Martin wrote: > > > > Further to my adventures attempting to clone the boot drive of my > Mac ... > > I attempted cloning using dd - the idea being that a block copy would > avoid any issues with metadata that might be encountered using file > transfers. I/O errors were encountered (I believe a read on the > source drive was cited). > > CCC failed in block mode, and subsequently defaulted to file mode in > spite of copying between identical types of drives. Then it failed in > file mode. > > SuperDuper (copies in file mode only) appeared to have no difficulty - > though the target drive would not boot until I did it a second time. > I have since made more copies which appear to boot. Given previous > failures, I am not sure how much to trust that I have a faithful > reproduction of the source drive (not that I have any other real > choices). > > I assume there is(are) bad block(s) on the source drive. Given the > size of modern drives (this one a Seagate 750GB), statistically I > expect bad blocks. > > In general, shouldn't bad blocks be hidden by the firmware on the > drive? I thought there was an internal mapping mechanism on the drive > to exclude the use of bad blocks, which was invisible to even low > level use such as the dd command. > > Failing this, such as 'when good blocks go bad', the filesystem (HFS+ > and I presume most other modern filesystems) will catalog any known > bad blocks to avoid using them for files. > > Should I be trying to return a warrantied drive after read errors > occur? Discard it if it is not warrantied? > > If the filesystem has isolated all bad blocks on the source drive, > then dd conv=noerror should work so long as there are no bad blocks on > the target drive. Does conv=noerror pad the missing/unreadable data > so that the ends of the source and data drive/partitions 'line up'? > HFS+ stores important info in the last 2 sectors. > > After cloning, how do you verify identical file contents between > clones? After a file level copy using SuperDuper, a comparison using > FileMerge shows that many files do not match (I booted to one, so > Spotlight data will differ). I think FileMerge complains about > identical identifying data between the clones that it is asked to > compare, though there is no problem mounting identical clones. > > Since I happened to be at an Apple Store in Minneapolis, I purchased > DiskTools Pro, which is advertised to "fix bad sectors" - identifying > which files are affected by them. I am not sure how much to trust it, > especially with destructive operations like defrag. I hope to try the > "fix bad sectors" soon. Does anyone have experience with DiskTools Pro? > > Dan Martin > GP Hospital Practitioner > Computer Scientist > ummar143 at shaw.ca > (204) 831-1746 > answering machine always on > > _______________________________________________ > Roundtable mailing list > Roundtable at muug.mb.ca > http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.muug.mb.ca/pipermail/roundtable/attachments/20090819/a1e2d60b/attachment.html From gedetil at cs.umanitoba.ca Thu Aug 20 10:21:40 2009 From: gedetil at cs.umanitoba.ca (Gilbert E. Detillieux) Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:21:40 -0500 Subject: [RndTbl] Fwd: UG News: O'Reilly Radar Global Issues Webcast Series Message-ID: <4A8D6A04.7040709@cs.umanitoba.ca> FYI... -------- Original Message -------- Subject: UG News: O'Reilly Radar Global Issues Webcast Series Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 08:07:23 -0700 If you would like to view this information in your browser, click here . O'Reilly Forward this announcement Hi there, Can you share this announcement with your group members if you think they'll be interested? We've just launched a new webcast series focusing on issues and concerns that transcend national boundaries. The O'Reilly Radar Global Issues Webcast Series will feature scientists, technologists, and other thought leaders seeking to inform and engage O'Reilly's audience about the most pressing issues of the day, including energy, climate, the environment, and globalization. The series, offered free of charge, is designed to educate as well as involve the audience in an ongoing discussion about these topics. Kicking off the series is *Energy Literacy* presented by Dr. Saul Griffith, on Wednesday, August 26 at 10am PT. Griffith has multiple degrees in materials science and mechanical engineering, and is the co-founder of numerous companies, including WattzOn , a free online tool to quantify, track, compare and understand the total amount of energy needed to support all of the facets of your lifestyle. Registration is required in advance. On September 3, Prof. Per F. Peterson, chair of the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, will present *Nuclear Energy: Future Directions* . Peterson's talk will cover the current status of nuclear energy, and review the potential directions the technology may go in the future. Other speakers in the series include Dr. S. Pete Worden, NASA Ames Research Center Director and Sameer Padania, Hub Manager for Witness.org. Rather than offering a passive experience, webcasts provide the opportunity for audience participation. Attendees view the live presentations via their computers and are encouraged to share comments, questions, and resources through the event chat room while the event takes place. "Our webcasts typically attract a global audience. It's not unusual to host participants from thirty countries or more," says Allen Noren, O'Reilly's vice president of online initiatives. "Each webcast generates an explosion of creative participation, much like our conferences. We fully expect that attendees of this series will be informed, and we fully expect to see solutions offered." For more information about the O'Reilly Radar Global Issues Webcast Series and other O'Reilly webcasts, see: *oreilly.com/webcasts* Thanks-- Marsee Henon Spreading the knowledge of innovators oreilly.com You are receiving this email because you are a User Group contact with O'Reilly Media. Forward this announcement . O'Reilly Media, Inc. 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472 (707) 827-7000 From gedetil at cs.umanitoba.ca Thu Aug 20 11:07:56 2009 From: gedetil at cs.umanitoba.ca (Gilbert E. Detillieux) Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:07:56 -0500 Subject: [RndTbl] Fwd: USENIX SustainIT '10 Call For Papers Now Available Message-ID: <4A8D74DC.2060504@cs.umanitoba.ca> FYI... -------- Original Message -------- Subject: USENIX SustainIT '10 Call For Papers Now Available Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2009 08:32:15 -0700 From: Lionel Garth Jones The Program Committee for the the First USENIX Workshop on Sustainable Information Technology (SustainIT '10) invites you to submit your papers. Increasingly, designers of computer systems ranging from small mobile devices to massive datacenters are concerned with sustainable design, including both power and life-cycle costs; these costs should include manufacturing, operation, and disposal of IT systems. We seek papers that evaluate energy-related issues and their aforementioned trade-offs, present novel new ideas, challenge and/or debunk past and present practices, and more. We especially encourage papers that discuss not just energy issues but also how they interact with other dimensions in a sustainable manner. The scope of this workshop is broad, covering research, theory, hardware, software, applications, techniques, etc.--all related to making computing systems greener. Topics of interest related to energy-sustainable computing include but are not limited to: * Energy vs. performance, cost, reliability, usability, security, etc. * Evaluations of long-term total costs of ownership (TCOs, e-waste, growth rates, recycling, etc.) * Total Impact of Ownership (TIO) in the long run (even decades-long) * Workload reduction techniques (e.g., compression, dedup) * Application of virtualization, cloud computing, clustering, and workload management * Hardware-based techniques (e.g., new electronics, clock-gating, disaggregation) * Firmware-based techniques (e.g., APM, ACPI) * Right-sizing techniques (e.g., DVFS, DRPM) * Use of FLASH and other novel storage media * Impact of storage hardware and software stacks * Application-optimization techniques (e.g., compiler-based) * Theory, algorithms, and simulated results * Energy and energy-related metrics (e.g., $$$, Energy-Delay, PUE) * IT services and techniques to manage energy and reduce costs * Sustainability and life-cycle analysis * Practical energy technologies for the developing world * Datacenter techniques (e.g., blade servers, low-power CPUs) * Software-based techniques at all levels, from OS/kernel to applications * Evaluation and modification of business processes to reduce the environmental impact * Economics of energy-efficienct software and hardware design * New datacenter cooling and energy-management issues and designs, including use of renewable energy sources * Thermal and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models for software and hardware co-design Please submit your work by November 9, 2009. More information and submission guidelines are available at http://www.usenix.org/sustainit10/cfpa SustainIT '10 will take place February 22, 2010, in San Jose, CA. It will be co-located with the 8th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '10), which will take place February 23-26, 2010. We look forward to receiving your submissions! Sincerely, Ethan L. Miller, University of California, Santa Cruz Erez Zadok, Stony Brook University SustainIT '10 Program Co-Chairs sustainit10chairs at usenix.org From gedetil at cs.umanitoba.ca Fri Aug 21 15:49:21 2009 From: gedetil at cs.umanitoba.ca (Gilbert E. Detillieux) Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2009 15:49:21 -0500 Subject: [RndTbl] MUUG Board Elections - Call for Nominations Message-ID: <4A8F0851.7070905@cs.umanitoba.ca> Hear ye, hear ye! This is a preliminary call for nominees to participate in the election for the MUUG board. Those elected will serve from October 2009 until October 2010. The deadline to nominate yourself, or someone else, is September 29, 2009. Instructions follow. The MUUG board is charged with coordinating the meetings and other events by the group. It's fun, and you get a role in guiding the group. All are encouraged to apply. ------------------------ MUUG Board Elections - Call for Nominations Every October the Manitoba Unix User Group holds its Annual Meeting, the main goals of which are to elect a new Board of Directors and to pass any special resolutions. (Aside from that, it is a regular meeting) Any MUUG member in good standing can be nominated to run for a position on the Board. As of this writing, the following members of the current Board have let their names stand for re-election: Sean Cody Senior System Admin. Prime Focus VFX Services Gilbert Detillieux Systems Analyst University of Manitoba Michael Doob Professor University of Manitoba Kevin McGregor Network Analyst City of Winnipeg Montana Quiring Systems Administrator University of Manitoba Doug Shewfelt Systems Specialist City of Winnipeg Adam Thompson Consultant athompso.net Of course, this list is just a starting point. Any member in good standing of the group can be nominated simply by getting the support of one other member. If you feel you would like to contribute to the group by running for a board position, please don't hesitate to do so. (In fact, we'd like to see the number of board members increase.) If you want to be nominated, or to nominate someone else, send a letter to the group's postal box or deliver it in person to a current board member. The letter must contain the name, title, and employer of the nominee, along with a short (100 word or so) biography, and must contain the signatures of the nominee and one other member. The letter must be received no later than September 29, 2009, which is 14 days prior to the October 13 meeting. Although the by-laws require that the nominations be done in writing, with signatures, you can speed up the process by sending e-mail to , with the above information, and sending the signed paper copy later. In this case, please include the e-mail address of both the nominee and the supporter on the CC: list of the message, so that all parties concerned have a record of the communication. Nominees should familiarize themselves with the MUUG bylaws, found here: http://www.muug.mb.ca/pub/bylaws/ If you have any questions about the election or the nomination process, please contact Gilbert Detillieux, either by phone (474-8161) during business hours, or by e-mail to anytime. Gilbert Detillieux Election Committee Chair ------------------------ -- Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: Manitoba UNIX User Group Web: http://www.muug.mb.ca/ PO Box 130 St-Boniface Phone: (204)474-8161 Winnipeg MB CANADA R2H 3B4 Fax: (204)474-7609 From montanaq at gmail.com Thu Aug 27 09:39:46 2009 From: montanaq at gmail.com (Montana Quiring) Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2009 09:39:46 -0500 Subject: [RndTbl] New Linux Maemo Device Message-ID: Hello, I know there's more then a few of us that are interested in and excited about this announcement! http://cli.gs/n900announce -- -Montana -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.muug.mb.ca/pipermail/roundtable/attachments/20090827/ef615344/attachment.html From ve4drk at gmail.com Thu Aug 27 10:27:44 2009 From: ve4drk at gmail.com (Dan Keizer) Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2009 10:27:44 -0500 Subject: [RndTbl] [Zum] New Linux Maemo Device In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Yeah -- saw the announcement -- holy cow -- nice unit -- but it will have to compete with the likes of the iphone, BB and other smart phones -- I'm on the BB now, but unfortunately, i'm going the way of the iPhone3GS ... :-) :-( Dan. On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 9:39 AM, Montana Quiring wrote: > Hello, > > I know there's more then a few of us that are interested in and excited > about this announcement! > http://cli.gs/n900announce > > -- > -Montana > > > _______________________________________________ > Zum mailing list > Zum at muug.mb.ca > http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/zum > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.muug.mb.ca/pipermail/roundtable/attachments/20090827/e90728a7/attachment.html From montanaq at gmail.com Fri Aug 28 08:02:40 2009 From: montanaq at gmail.com (Montana Quiring) Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2009 08:02:40 -0500 Subject: [RndTbl] New Linux Maemo Device In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: This just got announced too: http://www.h-online.com/open/Sharp-launch-Linux-based-Netwalker-in-Japan--/news/114103 Japan only though. :( -MQ On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 9:39 AM, Montana Quiring wrote: > Hello, > > I know there's more then a few of us that are interested in and excited > about this announcement! > http://cli.gs/n900announce > > -- > -Montana > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.muug.mb.ca/pipermail/roundtable/attachments/20090828/b7966226/attachment.html From uniquegeek at gmail.com Fri Aug 28 15:13:03 2009 From: uniquegeek at gmail.com (Kat) Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:13:03 -0500 Subject: [RndTbl] Roundtable Digest, Vol 56, Issue 8 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I was curious about a n810 or earlier model a month ago, but I found them difficult to find here. Anywhere I found them was almost *twice* the price of what it was in the U.S. Many of the site I was looking at seemed outdated, but even the up-to-date sites were disappointing. I even contacted a few stores Nokia had listed as retailers, and they did not carry them. The Nokia site isn't the mess it was a month or two ago, but still... I ended up settling on an Archos 5, which Best Buy has on sale, but out of stock. Future Shop matches the price, so I got the 60 GB model for about $250. I briefly considered an Ipod Touch, but apparently it doesn't play nice with Linux. I think I should write an article to tell you folks what usability and trinkets are like... On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 12:00 PM, wrote: > Send Roundtable mailing list submissions to > roundtable at muug.mb.ca > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > roundtable-request at muug.mb.ca > > You can reach the person managing the list at > roundtable-owner at muug.mb.ca > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of Roundtable digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. Re: New Linux Maemo Device (Montana Quiring) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2009 08:02:40 -0500 > From: Montana Quiring > Subject: Re: [RndTbl] New Linux Maemo Device > To: MUUG Roundtable , Zaurus Users of Manitoba > > Message-ID: > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" > > This just got announced too: > > http://www.h-online.com/open/Sharp-launch-Linux-based-Netwalker-in-Japan--/news/114103 > > Japan only though. :( > -MQ > > On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 9:39 AM, Montana Quiring > wrote: > > > Hello, > > > > I know there's more then a few of us that are interested in and excited > > about this announcement! > > http://cli.gs/n900announce > > > > -- > > -Montana > > > > > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: > http://www.muug.mb.ca/pipermail/roundtable/attachments/20090828/b7966226/attachment-0001.html > > ------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > Roundtable mailing list > Roundtable at muug.mb.ca > http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable > > > End of Roundtable Digest, Vol 56, Issue 8 > ***************************************** > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.muug.mb.ca/pipermail/roundtable/attachments/20090828/72d7612b/attachment.html From john at johnlange.ca Mon Aug 31 16:15:39 2009 From: john at johnlange.ca (John Lange) Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:15:39 -0500 Subject: [RndTbl] Tips for using grub? Message-ID: Just wondering if anyone has any tips on using grub? The grub command that writes the MBR is "setup (hdX)". The problem is figuring out which drive is the "root" drive. In a situation where you are trying to write the MBR on a drive that isn't the one you booted from, this turns out to be non-trivial. You can use grub's "find" command to look for a file like "find /boot/grub/grub.conf", but if several attached drives have the same file than this doesn't help much. Even worse, if the system is multipathed, the same device will be returned several times. I have a system here that I'm testing with and it has 4 paths to each device. The "find" command returns 4 results for every attached device. Anyone have a tip for how to figure out which one is the one I want? BTW, I'm trying to document this for a recovery procedure so it would be common to have several attached devices with almost identical file systems. --- John Lange www.johnlange.ca