I decided to stay at work for an extra four hours tonight. While no one was around I performed the hard drive upgrade to the Links Lab file server. My plan was to setup a new hard drive with the same partitions as the old one, and just dd the partitions from one drive to the other. This proved to be a little more difficult than it should have been.

Apparently 'df' does not report a partition's actual number of blocks. I created a partition based on the size of the old partition in blocks, according to df. The partition I was copying ended up being many blocks larger than the value reported by df. My guess is that this is how extra space gets reserved for the superuser. It makes sense now, but it didn't this afternoon. I ended up typing "dd if=/dev/ad0s1f of=/dev/null" just to get a block count.

When I finished this whole endeavor, and the IBM deskstar was purring like a kitten, I recounted my experience to -bsd on 'lily', an RPI-centric chat program. I was quickly told that "You should have used 'dump'", followed by "This is all in the handbook". I read about dump in the FreeBSD handbook and found it less than enlightening. I've pored over the 'dump' man page, too. The references to the 'Towers of Hanoi' algorithm seem to be completely unnecessary, but maybe that's just me. One of these days I'll try to make some additions to the handbook. It suffers from a few important omissions.

CIS contacted me about the laptop and the progress on a Linux driver. I told them that I'd check with Louis, who is currently attempting to shoehorn Jon's FreeBSD driver patches into Linux. If he succeeds, we have about one week to put together a distribution of software for the freshmen. If he fails, at least I can take a week off before school starts.

I asked CIS to setup a Redhat mirror, and some ftp space for me to upload my updates and custom packages. Hopefully it won't take the CIS beaurocracy more than a week to set this up.... We'll see.

<random> One of these days, if I ever find some spare time, I want to setup a telnet BBS. I miss being a sysop. I miss 'LORD' and 'Tradewars'. They just don't make games like that anymore...probably for good reason. :) I liked the 'community' that you could develop on a good BBS. Some of the forum sites do a fair job of creating virtual communities, but generally the number of people involved makes such sites impersonal, and inaccessible. I want a nice small system with a few hundred active users, at most. I wonder if anyone would use it, if I set it up? </random>