Read Only

[Cameron Simpson]

On 17Apr2008 17:31, Michael Scully <agentscully at flexiblestrategies.com> wrote:
| I wrote:
| |  Please DO NOT start a new thread by replying to an old thread.
| |  Your mailer has kept the In-Reply-To: header, and made your message
| |  appear to be part of the "hijacked email" thread. This is both Very
| |  Annoying and may also prevent your message being seen by people ignoring
| |  the hijack thread. Indeed, what you just did is _called_ thread
| |  hijacking, amusingly.
| 
| 	I wasn't aware that Outlook would embed the in-reply to stuff in
| there.  Thanks for the tip.

It is correct behaviour for all mail readers. But since you're not
continuing the discussion thread, it is not the correct way to compose
a new topic.

| Often I will reply to some old message merely
| to get the email address quickly, but change the subject line. I can stop
| that practice for the list.

You should stop it for all email. New threads need to be new threads.
If your mailer lets you edit headers and remove the In-Reply-To: header
of your new message, that is as good. It is often what I do. I don't
know if Outlook gives you this control. If it does not you're required
to play cut/paste with the address, alas.

BTW, please don't top post either. Replies belong below a relevant quote
of the preceeding message so that discussion can be point by point and
with context. Quoted text needs to be trimmed to just the relevant
context, discarding irrelevant verbiage. It only takes a few seconds on
the author's part and is a great gain in readability for the reader,
but your respondent (me) and for readers of the list or its archive.

Keeping irrelevant text around also makes archive searches less useful
by making more messages match a search (which is bad, because more
rummaging must be done to find the relevant message in the noise).

I know that Outlook and many other programs place the cursor at the
top of the previous message. This isn't so you can put a reply there, it
is so that you can now progress down the message, trimming junk and
inserting responses sequentially at the right place. As I am doing here
and below.

| |  | 	I've been using external USB hard drives on RHEL for more than a
| |  | year.  But this condition only happens on one system. [...snip...]
| |  | after a time period of inactivity, the drives spin down [...] 
| |  | When they wake back up, the file systems become READ ONLY. [...]
| |  
| |  [...] I speculate that the OS tries to do an update to
| |  the drive at some point when it is spun down, [...]
| |  This causes the OS to
| |  consider it a write error, and common practice for various filesystems
| |  is to make the filesystem read-only to prevent further damage.
|
| 	Your logic makes sense in terms of what may be happening.  But I'm
| not sure what is different about this system of any others.

Me either. Does this specific USB drive _not_ do it to other systems?
i.e. keep the USB hardware and test again other OS/HW.

| [...] None of the other servers have this read-only dilemma.  

Hmm. Does the "hdpparm" command work on USB drives? Does it report the
spin down settings for the drive? Are these settings that same on the
failing system and the work systems?

| |  If you look at the output of the "dmesg" command after this happens you
| |  _should_ see some evidence of this happening.

It would also be useful to know if there is anything in dmesg when
the drive goes read-only. Can you reproduce this easily?

Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/

I have a flawless philosophical and scientific model of reality.
Unfortunately, it's actual size.  We must never be dogmatic.  Anyone
who says otherwise is wrong.  Will betray country for food.  Annoy the
censors -- mention Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka in your .signature.
        - studly at eris.cs.umb.edu (Kevin W. McAuley)