lastlog devours universe

[Jesse Keating]

On Tue, 2005-06-07 at 17:06 -0700, Andy Ross wrote:
> 
> The question wasn't whether or not software can handle the sparse
> file, but whether human sysadmins will know this.  Seriously: tell me
> you weren't surprised to find a 1,254,130,450,140 byte file sitting in
> the same directory as benign stuff like "messages" and "maillog".  I
> was surprised.  Other posters to this thread were surprised.

I was mildly interested when I first saw it, I don't know how long ago,
especially when du reported something different.  A quick google showed
me what was going on, and led me to investigate my 'standard' tools to
make sure I was using the right argument.

> Surprise is bad, and you can't document your way out of the problem by
> adding flags to tar and rsync (which I'll come right out and admit
> that I've never used nor heard of).

Changes happen.  You must learn to anticipate and prepare for them.
Sysadmins should have the base knowledge about file systems and such
strange and wonderful things as sparse files.  When reading about
backups and such, sparse files are mentioned and documented on how to
work with them.

> Maybe shadow-utils is too far upstream, too old, or too arcane for you
> guys to fix.  But I can't see this as anything but a bug.  If you're
> going to "not a bug" this, then you should probably consider why the
> -S/--sparse flags to your backup tools are not on by default.

There are NO default flags.  If you did 'tar' does it do anything?
Gives you usage right?  I beg the question, how can a flag by 'on by
default' ?  How is a 'sparse' file a bug?  Do you consider a dev file a
bug?  You can't very well tar up or copy /dev/urandom, is that a bug?
Oh wait, I bet a sysadmin knows that she/he can't backup stuff in
the /dev/ tree, just like she/he should know that sparse files exist and
should be accounted for.  Don't pass your lack of understanding off as a
bug.

> As it stands, very few users have hardware capable of making a backup
> of the standard FC4/x86_64 log directory using standard arguments to
> standard tools.
> 

and what is a 'standard argument' to a 'standard tool'?  I see nothing
in the man page that says "These arguments are the standard arguments."
or further  "Anything that isn't supported by these is a bug".  Again,
just because YOU didn't know about sparse files does NOT make it a bug.

-- 
Jesse Keating RHCE      (geek.j2solutions.net)
Fedora Legacy Team      (www.fedoralegacy.org)
GPG Public Key          (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub)
 
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