Re: CD/DVD Vendors (was Re: Debian 7.0.0 dvd's)
A couple of points in my defense.......... The main problem with CD/DVD vendors of Linux distributions is the reliablity of the burning. Becuase of my relative isolation I have been using such CD/DVD sets for years and around half of the supplied sets __will__ have writing faults, particularly anyone using those awfull no-name media. ie most. If you install directly from the sets this may not be an issue as the faulty files may not be being used but as i recover all files and build my own repository this is an issue I regularly come across. This is why I have asked for ISO images as this problem does not apply. Second point, While it would be nice to come down to a LUV meeting this takes a good portion of a whole day and the trip down and back wil cost around 100 dollars, for such money a could bye line time to down load the 3 DVD's. Another point here like a good number of people living in rural areas I do not like driving in Melbourne and I certainly am __NOT__ comfortable about finding parking around North Melbourne in the afternoon peak hour and driving home at 0200 in the morning is no picknick these days. Its all got to hard, I will think of another way around the problem. Thankyou to the two people that responded with offers, it was apreciated. Linux for 20 years, Lindsay
On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 06:27:46PM +1000, zlinw@mcmedia.com.au wrote:
A couple of points in my defense..........
i'm sorry if you took my post as any kind of criticism of you personally (or on anyone else). that really wasn't my intention. my intention was to point out that there are numerous vendors of cheap CDs and DVDs, and that other people's time is valuable. (and, having done it numerous times in the past, i've got first-hand knowledge of the fact that burning DVDs is tedious and time-consuming)
The main problem with CD/DVD vendors of Linux distributions is the reliablity of the burning. Becuase of my relative isolation I have been using such CD/DVD sets for years and around half of the supplied sets __will__ have writing faults, particularly anyone using those awfull no-name media. ie most.
ah, okay. if they suck that badly, that's a good reason not to use those particular vendors. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au> BOFH excuse #374: It's the InterNIC's fault.
Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> wrote:
The main problem with CD/DVD vendors of Linux distributions is the reliablity of the burning. Becuase of my relative isolation I have been using such CD/DVD sets for years and around half of the supplied sets __will__ have writing faults, particularly anyone using those awfull no-name media. ie most.
ah, okay. if they suck that badly, that's a good reason not to use those particular vendors.
Do they not read back the media and verify hashes before considering the product ready for sale? If there's a high failure rate, customer dissatisfaction is likely to be an issue, especially in the highly connected Linux market where reputations count so much. As an aside, are flash devices any more reliable? I also remember the days of floppy disks when you could turn on verification so that every write was followed by a read of the same sectors, a performance cost but usually worth it in circumstances demanding higher levels of assurance.
On 14/05/2013 7:27 PM, Jason White wrote:
As an aside, are flash devices any more reliable? I also remember the days of floppy disks when you could turn on verification so that every write was followed by a read of the same sectors, a performance cost but usually worth it in circumstances demanding higher levels of assurance.
Yes, but floppies could also be a problem if the drives had variances anyway; you may be able to write and read using the same floppy drive, but it may fail on another drive. Flash is pretty good these days, rarely do I see any problems. Cheers A.
On 14/05/2013 7:44 PM, Andrew McGlashan wrote:>>
Yes, but floppies could also be a problem if the drives had variances anyway; you may be able to write and read using the same floppy drive, but it may fail on another drive.
Oh and CDs/DVDs have also have/had compatibility problems, you can read some disks in some drives without problems, but no hope with other drives -- you need media that is compatible first; it should be a given, but it's not. Cheers A.
On Tue, 14 May 2013, Jason White <jason@jasonjgw.net> wrote:
Do they not read back the media and verify hashes before considering the product ready for sale? If there's a high failure rate, customer dissatisfaction is likely to be an issue, especially in the highly connected Linux market where reputations count so much.
I haven't had any problems with CD burning. For my own use I don't bother verifying the media and it hasn't been a problem for me. I would be surprised if DVDs were that much use.
As an aside, are flash devices any more reliable? I also remember the days of floppy disks when you could turn on verification so that every write was followed by a read of the same sectors, a performance cost but usually worth it in circumstances demanding higher levels of assurance.
Has anyone here had problems with flash drives? I haven't. The only read errors I recall are the ones from when I used USB flash devices for the root and /var/cache/squid filesystems. I have started to use BTRFS for flash drives so silent data corruption at the storage layer will be apparent. In the past when using filesystems such as Ext3 it's possible that some files were silently corrupted. However I have used USB devices for large gzip compressed files and the fact that they could be decompressed is proof that they were OK. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/
On 14/05/13 7:53 PM, Russell Coker wrote:
Has anyone here had problems with flash drives? I haven't. The only read errors I recall are the ones from when I used USB flash devices for the root and /var/cache/squid filesystems. I had one flash drive that died after very little use, only one that's done that. It wasn't used for anything particularly stressful, just storage and copying of files, not swap or anything frequently writing like that.
-- 73 de Tony VK3JED http://vkradio.com
On 14/05/13 21:50, Tony Langdon wrote:
On 14/05/13 7:53 PM, Russell Coker wrote:
Has anyone here had problems with flash drives? I haven't. The only read errors I recall are the ones from when I used USB flash devices for the root and /var/cache/squid filesystems. I had one flash drive that died after very little use, only one that's done that. It wasn't used for anything particularly stressful, just storage and copying of files, not swap or anything frequently writing like that.
I've had a couple of usb drives go bad. They had some use, but mostly reads, not many write cycles. I tend to use btrfs on usb media now too since it picks up otherwise-silent corruption on these things.
Has anyone here had problems with flash drives? I haven't. The only read errors I recall are the ones from when I used USB flash devices for the root and /var/cache/squid filesystems.
The usb flash disk I carry around with me with a bunch of tools on it is pretty much unwritable. Any file I write to it now may or may not be readable. Existing files are fine though. This particular flash disk is about 5 years old and has spent a day in a cup of water and been through the wash (pesky kids!). I'll replace it when I need to update it. One service we provide for customers is doing restore tests - a full restore of their servers (physical or virtual) onto virtual hardware in our office to 'prove' the backups. On one occasion I burned a whole day because I'd copied an ISO of the boot CD (it was a Windows server using Backup Exec Intelligent Disaster Recovery) onto a usb flash disk and it had a single flipped bit which meant the restore would seem to fail with a network error very soon after starting. It was only on a whim that I did an sum of the original iso and my copy and found that they were different. This one was a pretty much brand new usb flash disk. I didn't do any testing on it after so I don't know if the flipped bit was just a freak occurrence or an actual fault with a flash cell. Maybe I've just been unlucky? James
participants (8)
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Andrew McGlashan -
Craig Sanders -
James Harper -
Jason White -
Russell Coker -
Toby Corkindale -
Tony Langdon -
zlinw＠mcmedia.com.au