Re: [Pan-users] "Automatic" unsubscription (bug?)

[Duncan]

On Fri 16 May 2003 06:08, Frank Van Damme posted as excerpted below:
> btw, having 100000 articles in separate files is no big deal with a
> filesystem like reiserfs, but with fat it is going to eat space like crazy
> (16 or even 32 Kbyte cluster size).

No kidding!  Even the 1K block sizes of ext2/3 eat it some.  I run reiserfs on 
all my (Linux) partitions.  I just booted back to DOS/MSWormOS for the first 
time in months, auto-updated Lose98, and then returned to DOS mode to run 
Partition Magic to move a few legacy FAT32 partitions around and make it so I 
could take out my oldest hd, a 7G.  I haven't actually removed it yet, but 
it's disabled in BIOS now, and I have to remove it b4 the latest LILO upgrade 
will update my bootsector.

The latest LILO apparently added a new check for serial numbers, and It says 
the first partition on that and the main MSWormOS drive, 27G I think (the 
Linux drive I use now is the newest, 100G), have the same serial number, and 
refuses to continue.  That's not surprising, since I copied the partition off 
the old one to the new one using Partition Magic.  I've been thinking it's 
time to consolidate the legacy FAT partitions on a single drive, since I've 
deleted a bunch of old proprietary-ware stuff and there's room to do it, so 
this is the opportunity to do that, rather than fooling around with the 
serial numbers.  I noticed even b4 I switched off of MSWormOS that the oldest 
drive was hesitating sometimes when I went to read stuff off it, and it seems 
to take forever now to wake up out of suspend mode since I don't use it that 
much, so I might as well get it off my system, rather than mucking around 
with the serial numbers on it.

Anyway, I hadn't had to deal with cluster sizes in ages, using reiserfs, so 
that refreshed the evils of FAT, even FAT32, in my mind.  <g>

(I'm keeping the old MSWormOS Lose98 around, with little more than the OS 
itself, for testing purposes.  It's handy to have a second OS to boot to, in 
case you TOTALLY fudge up your first one, especially if like me you are 
running beta (Mdk Cooker) all the time.  That way I can switch primary drives 
in BIOS and boot from the MSWormOS drive to jump on the web and find out how 
to fix whatever Linux problem, if I need to.  Additionally, as I said, it's 
handy for testing whether hardware problems are actually hardware or just 
kernel module and configuration issues.  If it works in MSWormOS, I know it 
can't be hardware.  However, the MSWormOS side goes months between boots, and 
I'll probably be dropping it for good when I switch to Linux on i86-64, later 
this year, if things go well.  I'm hoping to go with a dual CPU board, altho 
I'll run single processor originally, until I scrape more $$ together for the 
second round of upgrades.)

-- 
Duncan
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin