Volition

You realise this is purely psychological, don't you?

> ls -li /sbin/fastboot
16635 -r-xr-xr-x 4 root wheel 6228 Feb 12 00:10 /sbin/fastboot
> ls -li /sbin/reboot
16635 -r-xr-xr-x 4 root wheel 6228 Feb 12 00:10 /sbin/reboot

The first column is the inode. It's the same exact file. Further, this gives me nothing:

> grep fastboot /usr/src/sbin/reboot/reboot.c

It doesn't even do anything different depending on the name you run it as. Placebo, man, placebo.

Posted by: Paul Hoadley on April 18, 2005 12:26 AM

Yeah, it's those placebos man. Can't get enough.

You didn't read the man page, did you? :)

Posted by: Mike on April 18, 2005 11:48 AM

> You didn't read the man page, did you? :)

Nyeh, skimmed it. I went straight to the open sauce!1!

Posted by: Paul Hoadley on April 18, 2005 05:16 PM

LOL1!

So are you running 5.x yet? Is it worth it?

Posted by: Mike on April 19, 2005 12:34 AM

Yes, I am running 5.3 on several machines. It's worth it in that I can't see any reason not to upgrade. Then again, my 'main box' was running 4.8 until last week. Certainly if you're building a new machine, there wouldn't be any reason not to install 5.3. Is that clear? :-)

Posted by: Paul Hoadley on April 19, 2005 08:22 PM

Actually, yes. :) That's about what I was thinking - upgrade when I next have to do a new install.

How did the upgrade from 4.8 go?

Posted by: Mike on April 19, 2005 09:02 PM

The short answer would be 'badly'.

But there's more to it, because it also involved a hardware upgrade: I bought a complete new machine to take over from the old one running 4.8. (Sure, a modern Unix can use some pretty lean hardware, but a P2-350 was getting ridiculous.) So I installed 5.3-R on the new P4-2800, and then upgraded to STABLE in the conventional way. Here's where it started to get hairy. The killer is that I actually _did_ do the research on the critical components of the new motherboard (an ASUS P5GD2 Deluxe). You would think, for example, that this line in the currently supported hardware section of 'man ata'

Silicon Image: SiI0680, SiI3112, SiI3114, SiI3512.

meant that, well, the Silicon Image SiI3114 SATA RAID controller on this motherboard was, uh, supported. Bzzzt. Wrong. Apparently it means "while the SiI3114 can act as a standard SATA controller, none of its RAID functionality is supported." Silly me. Luckily, this motherboard has, I kid you not, a second SATA RAID controller, the Intel ICH6R. Of course, ata(4) supports everything from the ICH0 up to the ICH5. Thanks for playing.

Anyway, I eventually gave up and used gmirror to do it in software. None of the on-board audio, WiFi or gigabit Ethernet are supported yet, thought I have uses for none of those in this machine.

Migrating users, services and other applications was _relatively_ painless, but suffered from a lack of anything resembling a plan.

Posted by: Paul Hoadley on April 21, 2005 07:47 PM