The saga continues! Well, after looking into software RAID on Linux everything pointed to me having to install the system all over again. I tried to find an easy way of using the existing partitions (such as by setting up the secondary disk as a RAID device, copying the partition data from the primary disk, then formatting it, adding it to the RAID device and finally rebuilding the RAID) but that was going to be a lot of hassle with no guarantee of success. So I decided to just bite the bullet and reinstall with one of the Ubuntu alternate install discs.
Archive for June, 2007
Madman Entertainment are currently having a stocktake sale on their website. All of the DVDs I looked at are going for $10. The sale isn’t on their entire catalogue (mostly on their non-anime titles) but if there’s anything that you want I suggest you head on over there and check it out.
Continuing on from the previous post, I have looked into various ways of achieving the RAID1 functionality that I need. After browsing some information on RAID on Linux, it seems that the reason the hardware RAID didn’t want to work is that it’s not actually a hardware RAID. The Intel Matrix Storage chipset requires that the operating system have drivers installed that handle all of the actual work involved in running a RAID (which is why these types of RAIDs are called “fake raids”). I believe these drivers do exist for Linux but they’re a pain to set up.
So, following that I looked into LVM, the Logical Volume Manager, as from my shallow understanding of it I believed that it would do what I wanted. Turns out I am slightly wrong in that respect. What LVM really does is allow for partitions to be spread across multiple physical disks and for those physical disks to change without affecting the virtual disk images that all your data is stored on. (For example, you could add more disks to semi-dynamically increase the size of your /home partition.) LVM is also a pain to set up from what I’ve seen and cannot be used as a boot partition. So it doesn’t handle RAID-like functions in the way I’d thought.
I did discover that there are softwares available to handle a “software RAID” on Linux, similar to what the “fake raid” drivers would achieve, without a lot of the hassle. The one I found, mdadm, actually creates “RAID” functionality by combining multiple partitions into a single virtual partition. This increase the flexibility slightly as you don’t need to have a set of identical physical disks. (Also of interest with mdadm is that it seems to have been written by someone from the University of New South Wales - go Aussies!)
I’m going to see how this new method goes tomorrow!
We all search for meaning in things. Software development seems to be an exception. Some of the things I’ve seen make me wonder if the people responsible ever took a step back and thought “what is the reason for this?” At a very basic level the understanding and contemplation of the meaning of a thing allows you to use that thing far more effectively than you otherwise could, or to know when and when not to use it. Alternatively, and from a more artistic point of view, trying to understand the meaning of something gives you a deeper connection with it and gives you a greater range of expression with it.
The study of meanings, according to Webster, is called semantics. I’d like to try and elaborate on a few simple points where I think looking at the semantics of something would improve software development practices, including student work.
Comix is an excellent piece of software that I use almost daily to view comics that I’ve downloaded. It fulfils a similar purpose to the Windows program CDisplay. It’s simple interface and purposeful feature set really set it apart from other programs in its class.
Today I had the fun task on installing Linux onto a Dell Dimension E520. I chose Ubuntu as a distribution for it’s ease of use and, given Dell’s recent commitment to selling Ubuntu on their computers, I thought it would be a safe bet for things like hardware compatibility. It turns out I was slightly wrong about both of those things, at least as far as the installation went.