Re: [gentoo-dev] i have an idea ! (erescue) ro-overlays

[James Northrup <glamdring-inc@comcast.net>]

overall I'm quite pleased with genkernel and have relegated much  
tedium to its functions over time.  perhaps it's a worthy mule for  
more responsibility.

I have mirror volumes which have survived almost 8 years with 2nd and  
third generation drives, motherboard, and architecture (32->64 bit).

in those years, the newer revs which don't jump up and bite me in the  
ass probably go unnoticed..

abstractly speaking, the clearest working example of what breaks is  
oft-times a recent kernel on a recent install disk.  slopping an  
install disk on a modern hard-drive consumes but a gnat's real-estate.

using a symlink foundation does a pretty good job of allowing emerge  
to over-write the static known-good binaries with dynamics, but  
occasionally the gcc and/or libc is a repeatable failure and having  
the ro overlay handy allows wholesale excision of the broken  
installs, esp on young architectures.

for whatever reasons, I pack my cd-rom drive bays with hard drives,  
and install with a cd-rom hanging off the side of the case tethered  
by its cables... right about the time its a bootable system the cd- 
rom comes off and the box is tucked into some crawl-space or other  
behind desks, shelves, etc. and hopefully forgotten.



On May 25, 2005, at 6:32 AM, Chris Gianelloni wrote:

> On Tue, 2005-05-24 at 14:11 -0700, Jim Northrup wrote:
>
>> I'm very happy with new GUID-based volume mounting and more stable  
>> raid
>> tools, but a CF-based or initrd root available when /lib goes to  
>> hell is
>> an absolute must for supporting fault tolerance.
>>
>
> If you use genkernel to build your kernel, then you will have a usable
> initrd with lvm2/evms/dmraid (via --lvm2, --evms, or --dmraid)
> capabilities and tools for rescuing your system.
>
> This is only good for filesystem rescue, though.  It won't help you if
> you emerge a bad copy of binutils or gcc.
>
> -- 
> Chris Gianelloni
> Release Engineering - Strategic Lead/QA Manager
> Games - Developer
> Gentoo Linux
>

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