[sclug] Help! with Ubuntu 8.04 (cont)

[Will Dickson]

Neil Haughton wrote:

 > /mnt/sda5 mounts /dev/sda5.
> Neat, huh? :-)

Better. :-) I'd have gone for something a little more descriptive 
myself, but hey.
> 
> As you can see, no UUID. If I want to 'fit in' by using a UUID to be
> consistent, what do I do to give it one? Is it worth it?

reiserfstune ought to do it. As to whether it's worth doing - TBH I 
can't see the point for a conventional PC. I suspect it comes into its 
own with higher-end hardware (eg. something with hot-swappable disks).

> My next big task is to get the wireless adapter (Netgear WG311v3)
> working - it was fine in 7.10, but now wireless is well and truly
> broken. I've been through all the Ubuntu docs on this subject with no
> success. The best I got to was 'wlan0 is ready' in the messages log but
> it still didn't work - couldn't even ping my router even though it could
> be found by scanning. 

I've never tried wireless under Linux, but this sounds like it might be 
a security issue. Have you checked that the card and the router are 
using the same authentication / crypto mechanism? It might be that the 
older release either didn't support the latest and greatest, so failed 
back to an older mechanism which happened to be the one the router is 
using, or has higher-security defaults which cause the same effect. (Eg. 
if your router is using WPA, but your card is using WPA2, it won't work.)

> 
> I can see that ReiserFS perhaps wasn't the best choice of FS. If I copy
> it to another drive, use the partitioner to change the fs to say jfs,
> then copy everything back, that should be okay, shouldn't it?

Not the partitioner! You need to use mkfs to create the new filesystem. 
Before making the decision, you might like to read

http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Filesystems/reiserfs.html

tl,dr: filesystems are a bit like text editors, but if you agree with 
Ted T'So that "[...]for a filesystem, performance is Job #2. Making sure 
you don't lose data is Job #1." then you might prefer ext3.

FWIW, I changed from ReiserFS to ext3, and it felt slightly *more* 
responsive, in general. Additionally, there was one wierd case, where 
XMMS used to take about 2 seconds to read my music folder under reiser, 
but took negligible time to do the same thing under ext3. I've no idea 
what caused that.

As to the rest of the strategy, yeah, that ought to work. Depending on 
the nature of your data, you might get a slightly smaller backup slug if 
you tar it rather than doing a straight copy; if your data is mostly 
media, there's no point doing tar.gz. However you do it, the key point 
is to prevent Murphy from catching you only having a single copy of the 
data at any point during the process. :-)


HTH

Will.