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New Way To Grade Decay of Computer Installations

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the use-the-welding-gloves-on-this-one dept.

skojt writes: "I saw this link in Dr Dobb's Journal (the paper edition) about the behaviour of a slowly decaying computer installation. It refers to a Windows installation, but as the author writes, 'But there will shortly be ports to Linux, Mac OS X, and other Unices; we are confident these OSes are just as prone.'"

2 of 534 comments (clear)

  1. ummm by elementri · · Score: 0, Troll

    I read this two weeks ago... what is the deal with /. news being so stale?

  2. Re: Just graph the fragmention .... by Moridineas · · Score: 1, Troll

    o, let's see: if it gets corrupted, you are in big trouble

    likewise if your /etc directory got corrupted, you'd be in trouble

    applications like regedit take forever to search through it,

    I searched through my registory for a non-existent string just now in 1 minute and 2 seconds. So yeah, that's fairly slow, but not "forever" or as bad as you make it sound.

    and it needs regular tuning and maintenance.

    What kind of tuning and maintenance are need for regular work? The things people have talked about here (defraging etc) are optimizations only.

    And as a system manager, I have a hell of a time trying to express simple concepts like "take the configuration of sshd from this machine and put it on that other machine" with the registry.

    That's really unfortunate--maybe you should try to do some more learning in the windows world, this is an incredibly easy thing to do. Open regedit, find SSH settings, right click on the directory side the key, select "export". Copy this file to the new machine, double click, you're done.

    So, what again is "not too bad" about it? I can't think of one feature resulting from putting everything into a single database that I as a user or system manager would care about.

    What do you mean by "system manager"? I'm assuming you mean managing a single system, becasue the knowledge level and ignorance here is shameful for any kind of system administrator. The registry can be accessed remotely for easy remote administrative changes. It can be easily backed up to rollback changes. It offers a way to make sure users can't change certain settings, install software that they shouldn't etc (user security levels need to access registry). On the programmer level, it offers an easy way to store all program information with a single interface. You miss .ini hell (or in the unix world have a billion files in the /etc dircetory).