Plantagenet Penguinista

Have you ever had the experience of sitting down to analyse some random program, & being faced by code (typically BASIC or some database language) which was obviously generated by something else — maybe The Last One (but of course, it wasn’t) or another 4GLish system? It seems that the awesome complexity of DNA was not good enough, so scientists have moved along to discover epigenetics which are another controlling layer (one commentator termed it “the puppet master”) managing DNA expression. This is one reason why identical twins can have differing DNA, as the epigenetic arrangements are what’s shaping each twin — as managers can direct programmers, so that one programmer might produce completely different results on two similar-appearing projects. This & other mysteries solved (no doubt more opened as well) if you happen to have a Science magazine subscription (I read over someone else’s shoulder), but the basic principles at fir...

Today’s little head-banger problem: I have a machine with a SiS SATA controller , which offers me two options at boot: no SATA controller, or SATA controller, but with the attached IDE drive defined as /dev/sda . This presents two problems, because all of the kernels I have available for setting the sucker up to boot order the drives normally (SATA as sda , IDE at hda ), so tangling with grub-install gets complicated; & because the systems this is a prototype for have two SATA drives, the (initial) booting member of which will always be defined as sda . Options at this point appear to be selecting a machine with a different SATA controller, or standing in a second SATA drive for the IDE drive. I suspect that the faux deity I described to sline is at work again.

Facing an interesting challenge. I updated a few machines in... remote places, & in so doing had to run the installer sans RAID (it complained about different machines in different ways) in a hurry, & now I address the challenge of enRAIDing a system by remote control. I’ve grabbed a disk image of one of the remote machines, & plugged it into a local machine as a test-bed. This has revealed an immediate issue: the SATA controller in this machine is different to either of the others, so it won’t boot the disk image. At the moment, I’ve booted a rescue image, borrowed part of the prospective RAID partner-drive & am bzip2 ’ing images of each partition into the borrowed partition, to implement a simple worst-case restore scenario. When that’s secure, I’ll get into making the confused SATA drivers happy, then use the resulting bootable hard disk to walk through the process of making a small chroot-ish area on a transient partition, then wal...