My own private installfest

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

When I brought my system down to use as a server if needed, somehow the primary HD went 
offline. This time fsck gratuitously decided to trash by usr/sbin and /bin and /usr/bin directories. I 
think the root of the problem might be the power supply connectors since that drive is 
downstreamy from a Y connector. 

Anyhow,  the system could boot, X would run, but some things just didn't work because of missing 
commands. 

Since I have SuSE 6.3, I decided to do an upgrade install. The first part of the install worked fine 
until after the first boot. Since this was an upgrade, the system did not replace packages that were 
unchanged. The main problem was that the system was missing grep. The second was that on 
the reboot, the installer was unable to mount the CD-ROM (I think the problem was that although 
the mount command was there, the lower level mount (isomount et. al.) was missing. (This also 
affected NFS and floppy as well as mtools) so I could not grab anything from my laptop. So, I bit 
the bullet and did a new install. Since I back up the home directory along with selected 
configuration files, I was able to quickly build a new system with everything I had. I also took 
Glenn Burkhart's advice and installed ext3. I may install ext3 on my other partitons and drives for 
the same reason. The only thing I had any trouble with was Samba, which caused my wife to 
pester me about when she could print. (The samba problem was that the /var/spool/samba 
directory was owned by lp and that Samba could not write to it). Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Associate Director
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org