It must have printed OK because . . .

Post #20,017 by Andrew Grygus 12/2/01 11:26:26 PM Reply	It must have printed OK because . . . . . I didn't get a sob story about how they couldn't ship because they couldn't print the UPS manifest (UPS runs on a Win box and prints through Samba to racoon's printer). One thing you can count on is a wholesaler is going to let you know about it if they can't ship. I wanted to test this but traffic is impossible at that time of day, so by time I got there all I could really do is grab the machine and run. There was no time to mess around (or the client really wouldn't be able to ship). I simply upgraded it from Caldera Open Desktop 2.2 to Caldera eDesktop 2.4 and StarOffice 5.0 to StarOffice 5.2 (the other workstations were upgraded some time ago). Delivered back the next day, and all was well. Linux servers can run for years untouched, but Linux on the desktop needs a major upgrade about twice as often as Windows due to rapid change. Fortunately it's easier than upgrading Windows because there's no registry (and because it'll still run on the same machine). My hd partitioning for workstations is /, swap, /home, with all the critical stuff in /home so it isn't wiped out by upgrades. On servers I have /, swap, /home, /u. All the configurations, user software and NFS and Samba shares are in /u. Very simplistic compared to what I've seen other Linux users do, but it works just fine, doesn't need "extended partitions", and I don't have to figure out exactly how much I need in /var, /boot, /opt, /this, /that, and /other_thing. [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #20,019 by a6l6e6x 12/3/01 12:00:50 AM Reply	Thanks for update. I'm glad the upgrades worked for you. The objective, after all, was to fix the customer's problem. One of the things I've always had problems with is the notion that Not Everything Is Worth Knowing. In this case the effort to find out exactly what the failure cause was and how to fix it would take much more effort than could possibly be saved with that knowledge in the future. Some things never repeat and are a "fluke". Sometimes we forget enough not to recognize a repeat of problem. Of course, when we can say "I've seen this shit before.", we are an expert. Alex Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. -- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
Post #20,040 by dmarker2 12/3/01 3:07:07 AM Reply	Re: Registry - advantage or evil ? Am interested in any comments re the MS registry. I had always thought it an evil as well as a deliberate hook-in but never quite sure. I gather that OS/2 had one & that is probablt where MS got the idea from. The one thing I was aware of with the Reg is how much traffic there is to it - seems like a substantial portion of disk IO is committed to feeding the monster. Cheers Doug Marker
Post #20,052 by static 12/3/01 4:54:20 AM Reply	Evils of the Microsoft Registry. It was a good idea once-upon-a-time and may well still be. As usual, the problem with the Registry in Windows is largely Microsoft's implementation of it. Back when all it contained was OLE application information, all was peachy because the structure wasn't too deep and the resulting binary file wasn't too big. I suspect that someone got carried away at some point about the possibilities of this hierarchical storage mechanism for numbers and fragments of text. Unfortunately, they didn't upgrade the back-end storage properly. And then they got carried away with the heirarchy. This the current crashing mess. OS/2 has a number of binary information files. I don't know as much about them but I do recall they were not as big a hassle under OS/2 probably because IBM did a better job of matching the backend to their purpose (IIRC there are several more of them than in Windows). Plus the fact that OS/2 remained with a thoroughly plain-text CONFIG.SYS. Wade. "All around me are nothing but fakes Come with me on the biggest fake of all!"
Post #20,076 by Andrew Grygus 12/3/01 11:47:27 AM Reply	Evil! Evil! It's huge, it's slow and it's fragile. When something goes wrong with it, reinstalling Windows will carefully preserve the problem. All you can do is blow away the registries, reinstall Windows, then reinstall most everything else. It can easily take most of a day. I have seen Microsoft's new "repair registry" function actually work without trashing the whole system - once. The registry isn't going to go away either, because it's where Microsoft loves to hide registration and licensing information. With Office 97 you could just replace the icons after blowing the registry, but with Office 2000 you have to reinstall - with the same license code. I remember the awful mess when a client's Office 2000 Pro got damaged and he "couldn't find the CDs". He tried to reinstall with Office 2000 Small Business Edition. It took me over two hours of hand editing the registry before I could get Office to install again. The first thing I do when a Windows computer comes under my care is fire up REGEDIT to get the registration code for Windows and record it so the machine can be maintained. If it won't boot, I boot on a floppy and use XTree Gold to search the registry for the code. The clients can never match their machines to their licenses. OS/2 .INI files are databases similar to the registry, but they are all very small, easily understandable and editable (with a .INI editor program), and most programs have their own .INIs (if they need a .INI at all). [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]

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