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SSD Failure Temporarily Halts Linux 3.12 Kernel Work
jones_supa writes "The sudden death of a solid-state drive in Linus Torvalds' main workstation has led to the work on the 3.12 Linux kernel being temporarily suspended. Torvalds has not been able to recover anything from the drive. Subsystem maintainers who have outstanding pull requests may need to re-submit their requests in the coming days. If the SSD isn't recoverable he will finish out the Linux 3.12 merge window from a laptop."
No backup?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Makes me wonder what would happen to Linux development if Torvalds was to get hit by a bus, or be incapacitated in some way. Is kernel development that reliant on one person that a single laptop breaking brings everything to a halt?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Why is this news... is this our version of People magazine, where instead of hearing about all the details of the Kardashians' lives, we hear about every email or event that happens to Linus?
He has backups all over the world. But like with any backup, you can't actually restore from it until you replace the failed disk.
It's comments like these that make me wish Slashdot mods could go to 10 instead of 5. Nicely done.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
According to a speech of his, that's how Linux got started. He accidentally wiped his MINIX partition.
As someone who's taken over server administration from very talented developers a number of times, I've found that being a great developer doesn't mean that you're a great sysadmin. Developers may understand conceptually that RAID and backups are important (but sometimes think that RAID is a backup), but that doesn't mean that they actually set them up.
And as a sysadmin, I'm tired of hearing that. RAID1,5,6,10,Z is a backup. It's not an archive. An archive is what you go to when you want the old version. A backup is generally one of two things:
1) Something that lets you keep chugging through a failure (raid5, a backup generator with automatic cut-over, etc)
2) A standby spare (tape, NAS/usb drive, secondary location with desks/computers/etc.
RAID (other than 0) is absolutely a backup. It's not the perfect backup but it is a backup. What it is NOT is an archive - last night's/week's/month's/quarter's data.
No, RAID is *not* a backup, RAID's only purpose is to improve reliability/uptime by letting you ride through hardware failures, but it does nothing to protect you from all of the rest of the things that can destroy your data, like file corruption, fat fingering a "rm -rf / home/someuser", a virus, a website hack attack, etc. That's what your backups are for, but you can call them archives if you like, but don't call RAID a "backup" because it's not. Depending on what the problem is and when you discover it, you may need to go back through several archives before you find the data you're looking for.
That is a ridiculous statement. Work is lost every time a drive fails unless it happens to fail immediately after a backup. Full backups take lots of time. If you understood git better you would realize that a lot less work is lost the git way than with old school backups. I'm sure that every time Linus does a successful merge he pushes it to a git repo elsewhere. All history is in the git logs. I am certain the work he lost is minimal, and is much less than if he was relying on nightly backups and the failure happened near the end of the work day. Just the effort of trying to determine what was done and what has been lost would be far more time consuming without git.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
That's just asinine. You should never rely on recovery of data from a broken drive to avoid data loss. Even if you do recover data from a broken HDD you shouldn't trust it hasn't had some form of corruption. Always have a backup. If you have backups, who cares if the drive is recoverable?
Also, don't buy Sandforce SSDs. There are plenty of alternatives that are faster and more reliable.
You're right in that you should never rely blah blah blah, but he's right in that you should be able to attempt recovery. And he's more right, because he never said you shouldn't make backups.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So... stay the fuck away from Sandforce controllers? This has been common knowledge for years...