[tex-live] Pathological search path for TeXMF.cnf

[Zdenek Wagner]

2015-03-17 0:21 GMT+01:00 Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de>:

> On 2015-03-16 at 22:31:43 +0100, Zdenek Wagner wrote:
>
>  > 2015-03-16 19:33 GMT+01:00 Philip Taylor <P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk>:
>
>  > > But a quick look at the system error log suggests there is
>  > > nothing too much to worry about; only 8 reported disc errors
>  > > since the start of the year.
>  >
>  > It is irrelevant whether you have errors in the log or not. During
>  > the last year I had two problems:
>  >
>  > 1. Failing disk controller
>  >
>  > 2. Failing power supply (at leas one of the voltages and the power
>  > loss was not permanent)
>  >
>  > There was no error record at all. HD was just in a kind of wait
>  > state which is not considered an error, it just makes everything
>  > terribly slow.  Sometimes the disc stopped rotating for a while ad
>  > then started to work again but it was not recorded as an error. Not
>  > all kinds of error states are reported.
>
> Zdeněk, do you really think that Phil should ignore the warnings only
> because your sytem crashed without any warning?
>

Of course not. I just wanted to write that HW may be failing without
showing any warning/error messages.

>
> Phil said:
>   "only 8 reported disc errors since the start of the year."
>
> What are "disc errors"?  Are they harmless?  I'm alarmed if my system
> tells me that there is something wrong with my disk.  Even if it's a
> false alarm, I take such messages serious.  A broken disk is the least
> thing I can afford.  I had a disk crash a few months ago.  However, no
> data loss though.  I could restore everything from my backup disk.  My
> heroes are the developers of rsync.  rsync allows me to backup my
> system efficiently.  Nobody creates backups if it's inconvenient.
> What I still don't understand is why rsync is so incredibly fast.
>

Copying opens a new connection for each file, if you copy a lot of small
files, you have large overhead. rsync does everything in one step. Anyway,
I do not use it, I use hdup2 instead because it gives me a history of
backup. I have already saved a few weeks of MD calculations when my
colleague's program crashed when writing configuration and he noticed only
after the backup was done. Due to hdup2 I was able to restore the
configuration from the previous day, thus only one day was lost, not
several weeks.

I bought new disks for my office computer this January because SMART
started reporting bad sectors. The disks might still be usable for some
time but the data on them are more expensive than the new disks. And I have
RAID, so I have replace one disk, waited a few hours for synchronization
and then replaced the second disk. It was not necessary to restore anything
from backups.

(But now we are going off topic.)

>
> Regards,
>   Reinhard
>
>

Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz



> --
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
> Marschnerstr. 25
> D-30167 Hannover                    mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/attachments/20150317/dd96d566/attachment-0001.html>