Re: mysqld wont start...

The Natural Philosopher wrote:

WE did teh calculations on waht we would have to spend to keep the whole
machine room up and running for 12 hours..it simply wasn't feasible
without massive amounts of money. Or a diesel generator.

I would not get that big a UPS in any case. Mine only _need_ to keep the
machine up long enough for it to do a controlled shutdown after a power
failure + a margin of safety to cover the loss in capacity of the storage
battery after a few years. You point out that it should have enough capacity
to cover both the boot-up time plus the controlled shut-down time. Good
point. (It happens that I have big enough UPSs for that.)

If I needed to stay up 12 hours, I would need additional capacity and I
would not go with increased battery capacity to get it since, as you point
out, that is just too expensive except in special situations. Since I am
talking only of two desktops (one quite large with 660 Watt power supply), I
would go with a natural gas or propane back-up generator which would be only
a few thousand dollars. Maybe a little more to cover the heating system for
the house in the winter. In USA such things are available from Home Depot,
among other places. I.e., they are commodity items now.

Backups are good: I hold my hand up to that. Backups mean a quicker
recovery from ruined disks. But these days i run a free service on a
tight budget.

But the old days of reusable tapes are gone. Data is too huge. It makes
more sense to have a spare machine or disk.

It depends on the application. I find reusable tapes to be quite practical
for my needs. I back up everything except a database onto a single tape.
These can hold 320 GBytes. The advantage of these tapes is that they
conveniently fit my safe deposit box at the bank (off premises) where a
bunch of hot-swappable hard drives (the main reasonable alternative) would
not. I back up the database separately because the dbms can do that while
the system is running whereas my normal backup software would not get it
exactly right.

I
said 'power falure during boot corrupted my files' and you say 'get a
UPS.'. Not only is that patently not answering the question I posed, it
actually doesn't even really totally protect against the classes of
occurrences that cause computers to lose power or crash during booting.

Well, they do protect against power failure during boot. They do not cover
the hard drives or CPUs or such failures -- though backups do in most cases.
Around here, power failures are quite frequent. In the last 12 years, I have
had only one hard drive failure and it warned me before it happened. In fact
I could have continued to use that hard drive, but I did not want to run the
risk considering I could get a new hard drive for US$80 that was almost 20x
larger than the original.

My google research into this reveled lots of people have had this
corruption, mostly when they had to hard reboot a computer that had hung
during boot, often when upgrading to new software.

There is not much that will protect you from hanging during boot when
upgrading to new software. I have had that happen only once in 12 years. And
a backup tape saved me from that in less than an hour.

An UPS won't protect from that.

True, but a combination of a UPS and backups will protect from most of the
problems I get around here.


--
.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642.
/V\ PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939.
/( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org
^^-^^ 05:55:01 up 1 day, 9:48, 4 users, load average: 4.07, 4.13, 4.10
.

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