[conspire] flakey SMART drive(s), FrankenDebian, oh my!

[Michael Paoli]

> Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2018 13:51:55 -0800
> From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
> To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
> Subject: Re: [conspire] successful install, at last

> I'll just mention again that SMART is (fortunately) vendor-neutral and
> openly documented, so smartmontools does an excellent job of parsing and
> dealing with that data.  The _bigger_ problem with SMART data is
> deliberate lying _to_ the SMART reporting layer by hard drive vendors'
> electronics, in an effort to make the vendor look better on a short-term
> basis.  Long story.
>
> What *I* would look for in vendor hard disk diagnostic tools is whatever
> they offer, under whatever name, zero-filling, the successor to the old
> concept of low-level formatting.  Which I guess I should now discuss.

Hey, if one wants an "interesting", "flakey" SMART drive ...
have a peek at Seagate ST31000NSSUN1.0T 9QJ3NDRE
on:
https://www.wiki.balug.org/wiki/doku.php?id=balug:offered_wanted_hardware_etc
Yes, could be yours for the incredible low price of $0.00 USD,
but quantities are limited, when they're gone, they're gone!
Yes, only one at that price.

> Add the following to /etc/apt/preferences (which you'll probably have to
> create):
>
> Package: *
> Pin: release a=unstable
> Pin-Priority: 50
>
> This says assign a priority of 50 (where higher is greater priority, and
> normal is 100) to any package from the -unstable branch.  Thus, no
> packages will get pulled from that branch by default, in normal use of
> apt-get.
>
> Now, add an -unstable line to /etc/apt/sources.list:
>
> deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
> deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main non-free contrib
> deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free
> deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free
>
> Good luck.

Oooh, yes, good luck!  ;-)  That would be a FrankenDebian:
https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian#Don.27t_make_a_FrankenDebian

But hey, if it works for you and you know what you're doing and what
the risks are, etc., great.

But if/when it doesn't ... yeah, ... good luck!
But hey, if you know enough to (very!) carefully create such,
and not willy-nilly throw various bits together, you can probably
also self-support enough to untangle any specific issues that
causes that you may end up wanting to untangle.

What is *generally* (strongly) advised:
Don't mix Debian distributions (in Debian terminology, Debian stable,
testing, unstable, sid, etc. are Debian "distributions").
So generally one runs stable, or testing, or unstable - or the specific
named versions thereof (e.g. stretch, sid, ...).
And along with that, if one is running stable, and needs some newer
packages, add backports, and if/when one needs specific newer packages,
install those from backports.
And, if you go (significantly) outside 'o that, good luck with your
self-support thereof.