[H-GEN] Where the hellies have the doobywackers gone?

[A Bruce In The Land Of The Bruces]

On Wed, 17 Jun 1998, Conor Cunningham wrote:

> Subject: [H-GEN] Where the hellies have the doobywackers gone?
> 
> Heya All,
>                 I've been reading HUMBUG mail lately and noticed that
> the headings ([H-GEN]) are no longer around on some messages. I thought
> the idea of the headings was really good as I could distinguish easily
> between HUMBUG mail (which I always read) and other mail (which I
> sometimes read). Well they are just my thoughts anyway.

I'm aware of this.  Due to a slight 2am error on my part when I copied
data from the old drives to the nice new drive (history logs show I
mispelt 'maildrop' :( ), the partition which the mailing lists was not
copied the final time I did the bulk copy.  (copying 6gig of data from IDE
to SCSI takes a loooong time[1]).

When I noticed this when the machine was powered up on sunday, I didn't
think it a problem as I still had the old drives around.  After plugging
in the wrong drive, I eventually got the correct one[2] to find that
instead of a FreeBSD disklabel, it had a Sun disklabel on it.  (although I
don't fully remember it, I suspect that after the aforementioned final
copy finished, circa 4:30am, I attached the drive to my sparc station to
reformat it.  thankfully I only got as far as disklabing it). 

After a long time juggling differences between Freebsd and sun disklabels,
(f'bsd and linux-sparc have differing ideas on disk geometry[3]) I
concluded that I was not going to find the actual start of the
partition[4], and recreated the mailing lists from backups[5] (yes, they
are backed up sometimes ). 

Since the date on the humbug lists as ahem, february, the actual
subscriber list was recreated from successful deliveries from the mail
log.[6]

Don't even ask me about the list config files, however I do have nice
clean config files again.

Points to remember if you ever consider migrating storage devices.

	Print out the bloody disklabel, right down to which sector each
	partition starts at.

	When copying multiple partitions, do consider writing a script
	which parses /etc/fstab .  Do not trust yourself to type in a 
	list of filesystems :).

	Do *not* use the old device until you have verified all services
	are up completely.  (exim has this nice 'freeze' feature ;) )

	Even if you've done this before, taking a copy of the raw device
	if you need to try and rescue it before you start repartitioning
	it is a good idea (tm).

	Get some sleep first.

--==--
Bruce.

tired and humbled :(

[1] circa 2 and a half hours.
[2] Getting the incorrect DEC disk storage unit when it is under a pile of
    heavy things and itself is rather heavy does not improve your
    attitude.  Nor does getting the right one.
[3] This disk has a geometry of blah.  I refuse to work with blah, instead
    I'm going to be working with halb and theres nothing you can do about
    it if you want to get any further, nyah nyah.
[4] further complicated by the fact that all of my fdisk and disklabeling
    with differing partition sizes appears to be slowly but surely wiping
    out the data on the disk.
[5] There is now a 'humbug' definition file in my workplace backup config.
[6] cat maillog | grep some-exim-weird-string | cut | sort > list ; vi
    list