[sf-lug] upgrading versus wiping and installing new

[jim]

Thanks: quite helpful.
JS: I've interspersed my comments below.

On 03/08/2014 11:42 AM, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Jim Stockford (jim at systemateka.com):
>
>> For the last two plus years I've been using a (now unavailable)
>> Zareason Atom-based laptop (anything portable with a computer,
>> display, and keyboard is a laptop to me). It has 4 GB RAM and a 500 GB
>> spinning hard drive.
> Ever considered swapping out the HD for a new SSD of the same form
> factor?   You'll thank yourself if you do:  radical increased in system
> speed, ditto reduction in heat and noise, much longer battery life.
> Me, I've been gobsmacked at the difference it makes.
JS: Excellent idea, thanks for the suggestion. I think I'll do
that and see if it has room for more RAM, too: Zareason has
great customer support
>> About six months ago I bought a new Zareason laptop (X86-64, 8 GB RAM,
>> 120 GB SSD).
> So, maybe you know about the SSD difference from your own comparisons.
> ;->  (The sweet spot for laptop SSDs was recently the 256GB sizes, and
> of course this situation improves over time.  Follow the NewEgg customer
> reviews to track the situation.)
JS: yup: much faster. Your report on the sweet spot surprises
me. Per Zareason's prices, it seemed that 120G was the sweet
spot: 250GB sported a higher price per GB (in September 2013
or whenever I bought the new box).
>> * I can easily rethink and re-implement filesystem (partitioning) and
>> directory structures
> If you have time, I'd appreciate hearing your partitioning philosophy.
> Lots of ideas on such things, and differing objectives, so I always like
> hearing what people have decided on the subject and by what criteria.
JS: I've got plenty of time (and way too much to do,
most of it unimportant).
     For my personal computer, I mainly use a browser
and an email client. I've got a few shell and python
scripts and occasionally use a word processor.
     For the internet-accessible hosts, one simply supports
a web server that presents several web sites, each with
only static pages, one supports the systemateka mail
server as well as a few rarely used resources (e.g. GIT).

UberRules:
A: do without if at all possible.
B: avoid trouble.
C: reboot early and often.

1. Gotta have a part for system and for swap.
     System needs at least 5 GB, probably nice to have
10 GB, I give it 20 GB.
     For swap on my personal computers, I use 1 GB
regardless of RAM size. Never had a problem. Storage
space is cheap; if it weren't, I'd probably have no swap
for my personal computer and hope for the best and
deal with over-RAM issues as they occur.
     On server hosts I always have swap and err on the
too-much side.
     I've set up server boxes with multiple 2 GB swap
partitions distributed across the used storage. Red Hat
docs of 2008 or so state that swap parts greater than
2 GB are inefficient (or partly unusable, I forget) because
of kernel code design limits.
2.   Other partitions.
     For my personal computer I usually have a 50 GB or
greater part for /home/. On my new SSD box (120 GB
SSD), Zareason set it up with /dev/sda1 for swap and
/dev/sda2 for everything else. I've got a stand-alone
USB3 spinning drive attached with a symlink on
/home/jim/Desktop/; I move files from the SSD /home/
part to the spinning drive regularly, and many of my
working files are only on the spinning drive.
     For server hosts I've got a part for /home/ and a part
for /var/. When I re-do things, I'll make a part for /srv/
and maybe for /opt/ and-or /data/.
     Usually I leave some storage raw: the first ("outer")
set of "cylinders" (whatever that means re various storage
devices) are partitioned, and the rest ("inner") cylinders
are not partitioned. That gives me the flexibility to make
special-purpose partitions ad hoc.
     On some boxes I've made partitions that are normally
not mounted, mounted for special purposes (backup,
restoration...).
3. Filesystems.
     I generally use ext3 or ext4. Zareason used ext4 for
the SSD. Ken Shaffer suggests using ext2 for SSD devices
such as thumbdrives along with noatime (avoids journaling
and inode table updates, which makes things easier for
SSD leveling).
     I will have to play with ZFS at some point. I don't really
need it--none of my hosts support sub-second activities
or elaborate disc writes, but ZFS seems so slick.
     I often reformat thumbdrives to use ext2 rather than
VFAT; I use these thumbdrives for backups and occasional
data transfer among my (all Linux) boxes; that lets me
preserve file meta-data, some of which is lost with
transfers to VFAT storage.
>> I'll be grateful for any comments, derision, suggestions....
> I use Thunderbird + Lightning at work to reach an MS-Exchange
> mail/scheduling system (via a Davmail gateway process, a Java app, that
> I run locally).  Thunderbird isn't the fastest thing around, but it's
> pretty reliable.  Be sure to kill and restart it every few days, as it
> has (in my experience) the slow memory leak characteristic of apps built
> atop Mozilla XULRunner.
JS: Holy Moly! I thought memory leaks were a thing of
the past!
     I have good reason to restart my email client: the
GUI shows waiting email messages, and I've become
an email junky: if I see email waiting, I drop what I'm
doing to look at it. Slows down doing anything but
email. Unload the email client and I don't see email
waiting and get more done.
>
> At home, I use mutt, which is stupid-fast and will do just about
> anything.  (Of course, unlike most people, I choose to leave my MUA,
> mutt, running 24x7 under a /usb/bin/screen session left running on my
> SMTP mail server, so that I can reach my Internet point-of-presence by
> ssh'ing to it from whatever device I'm front of at the moment.  Works
> for Me<tm>.)
JS: I've not fallen into mutt use and should have. I might yet
try it out.
> I do not plan to import my elaborate and huge Evolution email data
> files to the new laptop.
> Well, if you want to, there are ways.  It's kinda nice to have copies of
> one's mail going back many years, especially if you have them in a
> standard, easily-worked-with format like mbox (which has its drawbacks
> but at least is simple).  I keep old mail in gzippped mbox files, which
> then can be examined using zgrep, zless, etc.  It's handy and at the
> same time efficient of space (especially if you purge dumb attached
> videos of dancing hamsters and such before gzipping your archived mail).
JS: nope, don't want to. I'm a pack rat by nature and trying
to overcome that trait.
     I've noticed that I (and most others) accumulate files to
no good end. I never re-visit most of my old files, yet I still
think I might need them later.
     A serious down-side is potential confusion with resulting
multiples of the same file, each with different data (available
on pretty much every corporate LAN).
     In electronics I learned the concept of the "hell box": keep
what you normally use in an organized state and throw
anything weird into the hell box; when you need something
unusual, spill out the hell box and paw through its contents
and maybe you'll find what you want and avoid a trip to the
store. Same thing for data files.
     I've backed up every computer I've ever used, including
the most recent. If I need anything, I'll dig through the
backups.
     I am keeping all emails for a few LUGs, including SF-LUG,
BALUG, Conspire, and SVLUG (in mbox format up until late
February 2014). Maybe I should export the thunderbird
files to mbox format.