Nix and Doze co-existance (was: recovering FC3 from a bad superblock)
Benjamin Scott
dragonhawk at iname.com
Tue May 24 00:12:01 EDT 2005
On May 18 at 11:23pm, aluminumsulfate at earthlink.net wrote:
>> Today, I've got Linux, Windows 98,
>>and Windows XP, all on the same disk, without problems.
>
> In theory, yes. In reality, no so much. Just try adding a little NT4 SP3
> or 2K AS to your linux box.
NT4 SP3 hosed itself just sitting there, so that's not really a Linux
compatibility issue, per se. ;-)
When I was working at NTI, one of our testbed boxes was dual-booting between
Win 2000 Adv Srvr and random Red Hat flavors. As a testbed, it never really
got hammered on by users, but by the same token, it got a lot of weird stuff
done to it, and we never had any data loss problems.
> That's all it'll take to hose your beloved linux filesystems.
I'm afraid I have to disagree. In my experience, simply installing and
running Doze size-by-side with Nix does not cause any spontaneous data loss.
Do you have a specific symptom or failure mode, or even an apocryphal story
about what happened to you one day? :-)
> Obviously, you guys have a much higher tolerance for data loss than I do.
In a word, no, and I'd appreciate it if you didn't make statements about how
I practice my profession without solid evidence to back said statements up.
Now, I'm not about to dual-boot Doze and Nix on a mission-critical
production system for a major business or something like that. But I wouldn't
even dual-boot two releases of the same Linux distribution on a system like
that. That's basic configuration management and common sense.
> Simply the fact that you're running win anything means your system is more
> likely to go nutz on you.
Well, that really depends on what you're using it for and how you treat it.
> Additionally, there's nothing to stop win (any version) from accessing
> (trashing, etc. fill in the blank with your favorite form of destuction)
> your linux partitions if it so fancies.
And there's nothing to stop Linux (any version) from .+ your Windoze
partitions, either.
> To be fair, though, win9x does cohabitate *relatively* well with linux.
Hmmm. If I was going to live in fear of random Windows behavior, I'd be a
lot more afraid of 9X then NT. 9X has basically no protection against wayward
programs hosing the system. You're always a privileged user. In Nix terms,
everything runs as "root", all the time. That's a real bad way to run a
system, regardless of OS.
NT (and that includes 2000, XP, 2003, whatever-Microsoft-dreams-up-next) at
least give you the *option* of properly securing the system. With a great
deal of effort.
> I'm not going to lecture y'all on the risks of running windoze on valuable
> data.
You already have. :-)
--
Ben <dragonhawk at iname.com>
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