Re: disaster recovery

alex(at)lintelsys(dot)com(dot)au (Alex Satrapa) writes:
> Craig O'Shannessy wrote:
>> Never had a kernel panic? I've had a few. Probably flakey hardware. I
>> feel safer since journalling file systems hit linux.
>
> The only kernel panic I've ever had was when playing with a
> development version of the kernel (2.3.x). Never played with
> development kernels since then - I'm a user, not a developer.

You apparently don't "get out enough;" while Linux is certainly a lot
more reliable than systems that need to be rebooted every few days so
that they don't spontaneously reboot, perfection is not to be had:

1. Flakey hardware can _always_ take things down.

A buggy video card and/or X driver can and will take systems down
in a flash. (And this problem shouldn't leave *BSD folk feeling
comfortable; they have no "silver bullet" against this
problem...)

2. Devices that pretend to be SCSI devices have a history of being
troublesome. I have encountered kernel panics as a result of
IDE-CDROMs, USB memory card readers, and the USB Palm interface
going 'flakey.'

3. There's an oft-heavily-loaded system that I have been working with
that has occasionally kernel paniced. Haven't been able to get
enough error messages out of it to track it down.

Note that none of these scenarios have anything to do with
"development kernels;" in ALL these cases, I have experienced the
problems when running "production" kernels.

There have been times when I have tracked "bleeding edge" kernels; I
never, in those times, experienced data loss, although there have,
historically, been experimental versions which did break so badly as
to trash filesystems.

I have seen a LOT more kernel panics in "production" versions than in
"experimental" versions, personally; the notion that avoiding "dev"
kernels will eliminate kernel panics is just fantasy.

Production kernels can't prevent disk hardware from being flakey;
that, alone, is point enough.
--
let name="cbbrowne" and tld="libertyrms.info" in String.concat "@" [name;tld];;
<http://dev6.int.libertyrms.com/>
Christopher Browne
(416) 646 3304 x124 (land)