[geeks] Solaris 9/x86 Performance

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Wed, Jan 15, 2003 at 05:21:58PM +0100, Frank Van Damme wrote:
> On Wednesday 15 January 2003 15:27, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> > At the moment, my main linux PC has a corrupted deb database.  I haven't
> > been able to find anyway to fix it other than a reinstall, which I don't
> > have the time for.
> 
> Does it spit out any useful error messages?

I don't have the specific error message handy, but it was something
about a file in /var/somewhere being unreadable.

Lets see, going back through the geeks log, I see that the first sign of
trouble was apt-get update failing with this message:
Reading Package Lists... Error!
E: Read error - read (5 Input/output error)
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

dpkg -C returned a bus error repeatedly.

Ultimately, the problem was a failed harddrive.  I was able to
rearrange things so that the computer would keep limping along.  I seem
to recall getting an error message related to the first one, but
different the last time I tried dselect, but I don't remeber the exact
text.  I stopped recording everything after two people told me that
there were only two things to do to fix such package problems: reinstall
completely, or try to reinstall on top of the existing broken
installation.

A related issue is that I'm seriously cramped for local disk space.  I
was trying to put a scsi drive in the system to use as a secondary
drive, but it just wasn't cooperating.  Under some arrangements of scsi
controllers and scsi harddrives linux would hang on bootup.  On other
arrangements linux would boot and not see the drive, and on still other
arrangements, linux would boot, but the machine was crash trying to
format the disk.  All the SCSI controllers were known good, and two of
the 4 disks tried were known good.

So, seeing as I need to reinstall anyway, when I can find the time, I'm
going to disconnect the IDE boot disk, hook up a 4 gig and 9 gig scsi
drive, and try installing linux from boot CDs onto those in hopes it
goes better than trying to add scsi disks to a mostly IDE system.  I'd
prefer nearly all SCSI anyway.  Previously I had a SCSI zip drive but
was otherwise all IDE, now I'll have a IDE CD-RW (with scsi emulation
turned on of course) and otherwise be all scsi.  And, if it doesn't
work, I can just reconnect the IDE drive with the limping linux install
and resume limping.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd