Tuesday June 15, 2004

Esc != ^[

esc Esc ESC ... No I'm not trying to get out of 'vi' insert mode.

Esc in support services world I'm in reads: Escalation. Bad news for most people, good news for me, I've got a job!

It's actually gratifying, no kidding. Unlike engineering projects that get axed all the time, all customer cases must come to a close, eventually, hook or crook, and therefore escalation too. Closure is a good thing. You sleep better, or you try to sleep it off and forget about it... either way, I slept. ;-)

It does, unfortunately, get to you sometimes. Especially when you get to explain "fixed, unverified". What kind of a fix is that? "I think I can solve world hunger! But I can't prove it ..." More so when it grabs all your time trying to explain why it's unverifiable, to the point that you couldn't blog! Now that's a sin. The reason for my "unverified" absence at Blah!

"What do you mean you can't fix 'freeing free xxx panic'?" That take quite an effort to explain, simply bec. you can't be too convincing when each time you repeat (and repeat and repeat), it always ends with the sentence, "however, we can't reproduce it so we cannot be sure if it will not happen again." Although probability says lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place, Murphy's says otherwise. Since we can't prevent for sure a ufs quietly messing up meta structures, at the least, try not to panic. [See SRDB70770] It's not going to do much good if you run only 1 app on 1 file system, but the system stays up! You can still use it as an egg boiler.

Good 'ol ufs is too fragile to begin with. I remember studying about file system strucutre; inodes, direct blocks, indirect blocks, and that's college, wholly 2 decades ago! [Disclaimer: I'm 21!] Desire to buffer i/o opens up whole new opportunities to mess up in ways that's untraceable. By the time you see it (panic or otherwise), it's too late, since it probably happened some time ago.

What gives? Let ufs R.I.P. We have zfs, if you have to go Sol 10 just for it, it's probably worth it. I have yet to take a test drive, but I will, and probably give me something else to blog about too.

(2004-06-15 00:01:02.0) Permalink