Re: RAID 1

From: P.T. Breuer (ptb_at_oboe.it.uc3m.es)
Date: 12/31/03 

Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 05:50:22 GMT

Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@comcast.net> wrote:
> "P.T. Breuer" <ptb@oboe.it.uc3m.es> wrote in message news:c1drsb.t2a.ln@news.it.uc3m.es...

> > I really resent your ignoring the proper explanation! Do you want me to
> > give it again? You snipped it all away.

> Since you chose the programs and know how to control them, nothing
> about the programs or their default way of working is relevant. They

False. Go back and read the diagram instead of maintaining this chorus.
The diagram that explains the situation to you and which you refuse to
read does not have anything to do with client software at all. It shows
thread order down one axis, and post order within a thread on the other.
For your convenience I'll repeat the explanation AGAIN!

 That is
 if posts are as follows, arrranged in threads ordered by time of first
 post, and ordered timewise within posts, and X marks those that I have
 seen before, then the order in which I read them is:

   |-._
   | |_X
   | |_1
   | |_2
   |-._
   | |_3
   | |_4
   |-._
   | |_X
   | |_5
   |-._
   | |_X
   | |_6

 As you can see, this is "normal order" for reading all remaining posts.

 And the result of reading all posts in normal order, say in a new sweep
 through the newsgroup every hour, is that I read in this order,
 overall:

   |-._
   | |_1
   | |_4
   | |_5
   |-._
   | |_6
   | |_7
   |-._
   | |_2
   | |_8
   |-._
   | |_3
   | |_9

 As you can also see, immediately before reading post 9, which is your
 post, I have read not the previous post on this thread (post 3), but
 post 8, which is the newest post on the previous thread. And I have
 read 6 posts between the two even on this minimodel, at a time interval
 between them of 1 hour.

> do exactly what you've told them to do.

Try and remove the blockage that appears to affect your neural canals.

> > Only to keep wailing about
> > servers, despite my saying many times that it's an irrelevancy.

> You are the one who previously blamed the software for your
> problem in following threads.

Let me quote myself:

  Even if I did see it - and I probably would have understood it if you
  did - I have seen thousands of usenet messages since then, and every
  single one of the posts I have seen has disappeared off my client
  viewer (and probably physically off my server, since 200 posts per
  group is about half a day here) precisely in order that I should not
  read it again!

Note that I am (a) not blaming the server, (b) giving you the same
explanation *again* - posts I have seen before are not posts I see a
second time when I traverse the newsgroup again an hour or so later.
Therefore I do not see the posts in any thread in their time order. All
client software works that way. Mine. Yours.

Kindly cease what appears to me to be deliberate perversion of what I
say.

> I won't quote your comments but
> anyone interested can easily find where you said the messages
> aren't threaded. I mistakenly wasted a lot of time reviewing
> the actual capabilities of the software when in fact nothing
> is relevant but your choices.

Eh? What time? What review? What choices?

> > > Yet, while you are cluttering the archives with unnecessary demands
> > > for repetitions or complaints about *where* people put the unecessary
> > > repeated context that also clutters the archives, others often answer
> > > the question as asked.
> >
> > This is false. Or at least mendacious.

> No, it isn't false.

Yes it is false.

> All 17,700 of your posts, most of which contain no
> usable information are just in the way when I look for answers in

No they aren't. But I hope they do get in your way and up your nose and
give you a nappy rash and make your head hurt, and make you sneeze.

> technical newsgroups. I suppose I should have given up on usenet
> having any content years ago.

Look Marvin, there's a whole row of your rivets that doesn't hurt a
bit. Concentrate on that.

> A relevant quote from one of the
> people who had a lot to do with usenet being possible circa 1988:
> http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4829%40umix.cc.umich.edu&oe=UTF-8&output=gplain
> But, he didn't have google to help sift through the cruft and probably

He didn't have guggle? He had other search engines.

> > I'm sure it can do "the same", because I use it. But not while I am
> > reading a post. And not while I am replying to a post. It can do many
> > things, but exactly one of them at a time. Just as I can. Just as it
> > has always been.

> Do you want your computer to show more than one thing at
> once? "man X" Glad that problem is solved.

1) My screen is 1024x768. That is wide enough to show two windows 80
columns wide and full height at the same time (the screen is 12.1").
One of them shows some news (at half-height), the other contains work.
And a third shows some visual outpur from what I am writing on the work
area. There isn't room for 2 news windows.

I presume your screen is the same?

2) If I were to start a second instance of the news client, the state
of the two would interfere so that I would end up "losing my place"
in the groups, if I am not careful.

3) when I do do that, for example in order to quote myself as I just
did, it is hard to locate in the second instance of the client the
article I am now replying to in the first because I cannot see its
headers while replying to it (I am in vi, a child of the news client,
not the news client). And even if I could see its headers, it would be
hard to locate it by them alone. But at least I would be able to see
which news group it was in. It's anyones guess where in the thread the
article is, but I can locate the thread by title.

And then we might also hit a disappeared-off-the-server problem.

> > But as it happens, I don't care, since I don't use any such mechanism.

> So, why didn't you just come out and say that you don't care how
> annoying your style is in the first place instead of beating around

Because it is not annoying. I require you to make statements that are
logically coherent in themselves, not say "things are now back the way
they were at the start of this thread". *That* is annoying.

> the bush about how the software works (which is really how you
> work the software...)?

No it isn't.

> > You are verging on the argument you should be making. Go ahead and make
> > it, instead of supplying the above amateurish junk!

> The only argument I have is about the bulk that has to be
> bypassed when trying to find the actual solution to a problem.

Close. But no silver whistle.

Try basing your argument on what is good for the whole. I've pointed
out to you that the writer of the post is always selling in a buyers
market. That is, there are very few people who will bite on his post
and give an answer to it, and very many posts. He has to work hard to
sell his post to the answerer, making it easy to answer. I've spent
some time explaining to you at least what makes a post difficult to
answer, not that you seem to get it!

But it may be in both buyer and sellers larger interest that the buyer
does some work. You've pointed out a possible mechanism - too many
attempts to correct posting style lead to information becoming difficult
to find in the archives, leading to the market working worse.

I don't know whether that is true or not. I can say that I never have a
problem looking in archhives and only coming up with style arguments
instead!

But there are arguments of that style and much *better* that you could
be making.

Try them.

> If you
> enjoy taunting people I don't really object, I just wish you would
> keep it private and between consenting adults instead of in a public
> medium with an already horrible noise to sound ratio that is archived
> for posterity.

Shrug. (Not to what you say, but to the fact that you say it).

> > > one needs to see. Note that TCP networking works very well
> > > with no such thing as a negative ACK or request for a repeat. If
> > > you simply ignore things you don't understand the sender will
> > > repeat the request on his own.
> >
> > I must say I think that is a valid socio-economic tactic. Hmm ...

> And, in fact what makes networking usable.

But not the aspect of your comment that I was commenting on.

> Although in the initial
> release of Windows 95 Microsoft made the mistake of adjusting
> the retry interval the wrong way so on a network that is already
> congested one of these would beat it to death instead of quietly
> backing off when not acknowledged.

Funny.

> > Stop making up the figures. It's a silly tactic. I don't know what that
> > link shows, but it seems to be a page of threads to which I have
> > contributed recently. As usual on google I can't see a damn thing for
> > their heinous interface, but it says:

> It shows parts of your 100 most recent posts with links to the full text
> and the full threads. Once again your software works the way
> you have chosen. If the display isn't laid out nicely with everything
> just a mouse click away for you it is because you have chosen
> for it to be, as you say, heinous.

I don't control the layout of an http page on a mozilla browser.

> > Let me see: on post 1 I answer his question (for the throd time, as I
> > recall!).
> >
> > Did you have some problem doing the man pppd /log thang? For
> > the third time of asking ...

> I can easily see that the question was not 'how do I display the manual
> for pppd'

The question was how does he get pppd to put its logs in a file of his
choosing. The answer is that he does what I did, and type /log into the
man pppd page. That will take him (at one and only press of the return
button) to

       debug Enables connection debugging facilities. If this
              option is given, pppd will log the contents of all
              control packets sent or received in a readable
              form. The packets are logged through syslog with
              facility daemon and level debug. This information
              can be directed to a file by setting up
              /etc/syslog.conf appropriately (see sys-
              log.conf(5)).

and if he cares to press "/" a few more times, he will get to the
kdebug option, then the logfd option, then the logfile option.

That is the answer.

> and have no trouble knowing that your reply does not
> answer the question no matter how many times it is repeated.

Then start having trouble "knowing it".

> > (he wanted to know how to log pppd messages to a file - it shows up
> > when you do what I told him to do).

> It might;

It does.

> it might not depending on a lot of things.

Like? I looked at a man page from 1996 (slackware 3.0) and last year
(debian unstable) to check.

> Even if it did, the
> problem remains of wading past the irrelevant parts.

Yep - or would, if it were not that the first mention of log occurs in
the debug option, which gives him the syslog facility used and directs
him to the syslog.conf file. And then the second press takes him to the
kdebug option, and then something like the fifth or sixth press takes
him to the logfd option, then the next pres sto the logfile option.

I didn't know what the options were until I did that too.

> Perhaps
> this isn't a problem for you.

It isn't.

> It is for me.

I'm sorry to here that you have a mental problem.

> I suspect it is for
> every person who asks a question and does not have the problem
> solved with the first answer.

The problem is solved with the first answer. I can't edit his
syslog.conf file for him, or his pppd/options file, which is all that
remains to be done.

> Man pages were great 15 years ago
> when they all fit in 3 little books, were up to date, and generally
> matched the programs shipped by the vendor.

Uh - they were never "great". I remember the solaris manpage for
"passwd"!

> None of those are
> true now so it would make more sense to give the command line

Those things are perfectly true now (apart from the "book" remark, but
then they used to occupy 8 books, and I never looked in them, but
always grepped through them on screen).

> to retrieve the source code from CVS if you want to say that the
> answer is always there.

Shrug. If you prefer.

> The real problem these days is information
> overload.

No it doesn't. Information is not data.

> Terrabytes of data are available at your fingertips, most
> of it irrevalent but the worst is that which looks somewhat relevant
> but isn't specifically what you need.

Which is why I told him how to get the information he needs.

> > This is boring. I'm not going to struggle with googles html interface
> > any longer.

> Html has the usual problems of standards designed by committees,
> but you don't 'struggle' with it. It is a markup language to be displayed
> by the tool of your choice. If you choose a tool that makes you
> struggle, you can't blame anyone else for that.

I chose the best tool available - mozilla. I often read html with lynx,
but experience tells me that google is best treated with mozilla. What
do you suggest?

> Blaming html is
> like refusing to read man pages because the nroff source is ugly.

I can read nroff fine. I often read nroff. And write it. The markup is
trivial.

> Google is in fact the most significant thing that has happened
> since the printing press since it actually gives people fairly direct
> access to anything they can describe that has been discussed on
> usenet, mailing lists or web pages.

It's very very useful, yes.

> If Socrates' students had had access to Google he wouldn't have annoyed
> everyone into killing him with all of those boring dialogs. They could
> have found their answers immediately.

No, they wouldn't. How often do you use google? I use it about once a
day, I think (I could check, but I won't).

> > > who tries to find answers in the archives or the groups in realtime wade
> > > through 15,930 unneeded messages.
> >
> > False. Do you really want to be made into a plonk?

> That, like everything else so far is all your own choice. Just please don't
> claim that the software or usenet made you do it.

I am telling you that what I see is a natural and normal product of the
medium it is written in. Take the plank out of your eye!

You get the same view that I do. What you don't do is read as fast as I
do, so that when you get to a thread it still has all its posts in, and
when you get to it again much much much later, it has got another self
consistent set of posts in. But I read much much faster, so that I
effectively see posts as they arrive in time order, not threaded.

And for some reason, you are unable to grok that.

I could slow leafnode down so that it only got new posts every hour or
so, instead of every two minutes. But that would be annoying.

> > That's the problem - the same bios code will now indicate a different
> > disk. Since you installed the boot sector when 0x81 meant the second
> > disk (i.e. 0x81 is referenced on the second disks boot sector), when
> > the sda breaks, 0x81 now indicates what was sdc, not what is now sda
> > (and was sdb).
> >
> > You'd have to install the boot sector everywhere with references for
> > 0x80.

> That's the magic of the:
> grub> device (hd0) /dev/sdb
> in the commands I posted.

I'll believe you on that.

> If you followed the link I gave to the

I didn't.

> full text you would have seen the commentary saying that it makes
> grub write to the second drive's boot sector pretending that it is the
> first drive.

Uh huh.

Peter