[nycbug-talk] MSNBC on the decline of technology jobs

[Michael Shalayeff]

Making, drinking tea and reading an opus magnum from alex at pilosoft.com:
> > > Unix admin questions: * Solaris: how do you change fullduplexness of
> > > an interface? [ndd /dev/xxx]
> > 
> > Solaris.. what's that? :-) Not a Solaris person... (but I do know what
> > it is .. at least) hehe.
> Similar thing on linux - how do you do it? ifconfig gets half credit -
> half the time it won't work through ifconfig, and you need to use ethtool.
> Points to pointing out that ifconfig is deprecated. 

this is actually quite a rediculous situation these days that
on so many operating systems ifconfig does not work...

> > > * What's an inode?
> > 
> > Finally.. One, I think, I know. An Inode is how the operating system
> > tracks files and their parts. It uses a B-Tree data structure to track
> > files. Because of it's B-tree data structure it can quickly find a file
> > or all it's parts.
> Actually, inodes don't have much to do with btrees. The specific
> implementation may (now you are getting into ufs vs ext2 vs jfs etc).  
> Inode just has a list of physical blocks associated with this file.

it is not "just a list of blocks"...
in fact it does not even have all the block numbers in it
the block list is less then a half of info stored in the inode.

> > >How do you prevent yourself from running out?
> > 
> > If you are preparing a file system and you know you will have lots of
> > files you can configure the parameters to newfs to have more inodes.
> > 
> > If you already have the filesystem you may need to copy the files and
> > re-do the filesystem. You could also use a mount point to move some of
> > the files to a new partition.
> Correct. Could get more points for noting that some filesystems don't use
> static inodes and have infinite number available.

this is also wrong. there is always a limit.
for example all the inodes have to be stored somewhere
there is your limit on the number of inodes.

> > > * You screwed up boot block and server won't boot. You have the original
> > > OS CD. How do you boot off the CD the OS on the current hard drive? [very
> > > os-dependent, but in most cases boot -a will prompt you for root fs]
> > 
> > Use the install CD to fix the boot block.
> on linux, root=/dev/zzz, on bsd boot -a. Fixing i'd prefer an answer
> that'd say 'grubinstall' or lilo or installboot

boot -a has nothing to do w/ repairing a boot block.
one does not need root mounted as root to do that.

one can boot into any root and then just
fsck+mount the damaged root for repair.

cu

-- 
    paranoic mickey       (my employers have changed but, the name has remained)