Sometimes you end up fighting a problem and realize that you have two options. First, you can "give up" and start over (reinstall). Or you can keep trying, knowing you'll eventually come up with a solution and likely learn a lot along the way. The tradeoff, of course, is time. The first may take an hour, while the second can consume much of a day.
I opted for the second yesterday. I didn't get to bed early at all, but I did manage to fix a very odd problem on a server. In the process, I replaced the 2 80GB software RAID-1 disks with 2 120GB disks and undid the raid. I also converted the ext2 root filesystem to ReiserFS, my filesystem of choice.
Along the way, I learned a lot more about partitions, filesystem recovery, initrd/mkinitrd, and various other tidbits. I'm happy I did it. I didn't lose a single bit of data despite one of the disks seeming to be funky.
Later today, I'll haul the server to it's new home in a colocation facility in Santa Clara. (It used to live in Palo Alto, but I had to move it, thus killing the 520+ day uptime.)
Hands-on experience can be one hell of a teacher.
Posted by jzawodn at July 02, 2003 12:04 PM
I think you might like this quote that I grabbed from someone's email sig:
Experience is a good school,
but the fees are high - Heinrich Heine
Will you remember what you've learned in a year if you don't write it down?
I think that quote got mangled, I heard it as something more like "time is the best teacher, unfortunately it kills all its students."
