tlug: Thashed to death

["Andrew S. Howell" <andy@example.com>]

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tlug note from "Andrew S. Howell" <andy@example.com>
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This is one of those "don't do this at home stories". I cobbled
together several 100mb drives and thought that I'd give the "md"
device a try. John spoke about this during our Linux on Sparc
meeting. This lets you combine several drives into on, in various
ways. 

Well, it turned out that I needed to recompile the kernel to add
support for it. After the compile chugged away for awhile, it suddenly
died, complaining about being out of swap space. Simple, I thought, I
just add some more. Did that, restarted the build, and went to have
lunch.

I came back to find the screen full of messages to the effect of:

	swap page bad

OhOh! This was very ungood! I rebooted only to find that it could no
longer recognized the disk. At this point I decided to continue my lunch,
and cried in my coffee :(

Many many many interations later, I finally got the crazy thing to
boot from by linux box, so I could then install from Y&*^*L ( I can't
spell it, let alone pronounce it! ) CD. Now it all works, including
the md bits. Neat. 

Having thought about it, there are probably numerous bad things that
happen when you run out of swap. I should have rebooted straight
away. Oh well, next time...

Andy

P.S.

	Does anyone know what kind of memory the Sparc ELCs take? I'm
game to add a bit more.
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