[Nut-upsdev] Asking hard questions about the NUT architecture

[Rob MacGregor]

On 5/30/07, Eric S. Raymond <esr at thyrsus.com> wrote:
>
> This is still a case for remote notifications.  But I think the
> case for UPS-controlled shutdown is orthogonal -- it depends on factual
> questions about how well the system lands when you cut power to it.

However any system that's running on an UPS that has enough time to
perform a clean shutdown should "land" no differently than if you, the
admin, type "shutdown now" (or whatever) at the command line.

> Size of the potential userbases.  For every large-system sysadmin who
> actually needs a setup like that, I would be astonished if there were
> fewer than a hundred single-UPS/single-system setups out there.  Just
> looking at the piles of consumer-grade USB-UPS boxes at Computer
> Center told me that --  the store expects to sell those in *volume*.

And how many of those are Windows only?  The target audience of those
UPS boxes is most likely the home user, who is unlikely to be running
anything else.

> That'd be a heckuva start. I'm actually kind of shocked to learn that
> BSD has such poor hardening.

Well, given that no Linux system I've come across in the last 7 years
has ever meaningfully used SIGPWR to handle a sudden power failure, I
don't see the fact that BSD doesn't support this as an issue.  I've
seen corrupted file systems caused by sudden shutdowns many times, the
most recent being a (current) system built just a couple of months
ago.

It takes a long time to fsck a multi TB file system...

Your experiences have obviously been different otherwise you wouldn't
be making the argument you are.

> I guess I still had some lingering belief
> in the BSD propaganda about their kernel being better architected.

Both the BSD and the Linux groups, sadly, have their zealots who base
their arguments on nothing but their own beliefs.

-- 
                 Please keep list traffic on the list.

Rob MacGregor
      Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he
        doesn't become a monster.                  Friedrich Nietzsche