On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 10:52:54PM +0100, Peter Onion wrote:
OPSE, original reply only sent to Brett.
moderately funny, imho ;)
On Tue, 2005-07-05 at 22:21 +0100, Brett Parker wrote:
We are not being wreckless, we are going very slow and explaining the steps.
quino: Type cp /etc/fstab . wild: cp: missing destination file
I think at that point you should have stopped and asked yourself if it was wise to carry on. I know what my answer would have been.
At this point we pointed out that the . was v.important, hopefully it provided a learning experience.
Maybe when you loose the "I'm a teenager, I know everything" attitude you will learn to expect things to go wrong and take a more cautious approach to things like this.
*shrug* the approach used has served me well in the past, the amount of risk involved was so low that if the person involved was that incapable then we would *never* have got to the part where we copied the edited fstab over /etc/fstab. I find your comment quite ott, I think we all know that we don't know everything, but at the same time we do know how to provide sensible tech support over irc.
Sorry, but just out of interest, how did *you* first encounter fstab?
Probably about 20 years ago when I was managing a lab full of Sun 3/60s, some Whitechapple MG1s and a Vax 11/730 and 11/750 running 4.3 BSD. ;-)
...and you said you managed to bugger up editing it... if you had adopted the practise we used on this occaision then it would have been v.unlikley that would have happened.
Also, as wildfire_cs had already said, he's got *several* ubuntu live cds laying about, so if all else fails, we can repair it from there.
And you're sure they will have net access when they need to ask you how to fix it ?
Uh, yes we were certain of this.
much when you're doing that and not listening to anyone else, and haven't bothered to ask the major questions that you outlined here.
And Neither had you though to ask about important data until AFTER I had gone. I wonder if it would have crossed your collective brain cell at all if I hadn't posted this to the list ?
Look, stop being such an offensive old stick in the mud, we have helped someone, and at the point before we would have told him to copy the new fstab over the old we would have asked him about data, but we *already* knew that there was no important data on the machine.
Peter, I'm going to kind of miss you on irc if you decide to piss off now, because of what happened tonight, I mean alug is just a simple collective of people who like Linux. I don't want to start a massive flame war or argue with you, but at the end of the day I would really like to be told where we went wrong. You took the approach that telling anyone how to edit fstab over irc was "evil, bad, wrong" which I don't agree with, how can anyone learn otherwise? using IRC gave the guy a *better* chance of fixing problems than working off some random webpage, at least this way there was plenty of backup/support and at least 2 of us casting eyes over what we were doing. If it was working from some random webpage or book then where is the support and help if something goes wrong and you end up with an unbootable system?
Bejesus, I like you, I just find that your response to this is way ott...
Adam