A rant regarding LILO and various other related issues

[Guy Fraser]

On Thu, 2005-14-04 at 21:43 -0500, Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, Guy Fraser <guy at incentre.net> said:
> > On Wed, 2005-13-04 at 22:49 -0500, Chris Adams wrote:
> > > And how is that one bit different than if you use LILO?
> > 
> > Err
> 
> In other words, no answer.

Wrong. It was to represent a sound.

You are obviously set in your doctrine, it would not make 
a difference if LILO pages of information about the error, 
you would never agree that the documentation and error 
reporting of GRUB Legacy are overtly deficient.

> 
> > > > Yes Grub has a command line mode.  Big whoop,
> > > 
> > > Yes, big whoop.  Real servers are not always at hand and don't always
> > > have a rescue disk available.  With LILO you are stuck if there is a
> > > problem during boot, while with GRUB you have a command line that you
> > > can try some things (and work around different types of issues).
> > 
> > FUD
> 
> How is that FUD?  I have given real world examples of why GRUB having a
> command line should not be dismissed lightly.  I've fixed non-booting
> computers remotely with a serial console (at 115200, which LILO can't
> do) at the GRUB prompt.

The whole time I was having problems, nobody told me how to 
access this command line, you talk about. As mentioned 
before I kept getting Error 15. I seem to remember reading 
about the command line, but was never able to get into it.
When does the command line become available before stage 1,
1.5, 2 or after stage 2, I believe Error 15 is generated 
during stage 2, but was never even told that by anyone 
who was willing to help.

I really don't give half a toot, about the command line or 
115200 baud console. It is of no interest to me. Any of the 
servers we have that require such access have hardware that 
provides those features. You use tsclient to access the 
hardware at 10MBps and can boot the system from images on 
a tftp server, or upload the image up to 2.88MB. We have 
test the system and were able to completely install an OS 
from scratch after spending about 5 minutes configuring the 
BIOS. We would never rely on GRUB to perform these tasks 
with what we have seen to date.


> 
> -- 
> Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
> Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
> I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.