[NTLUG:Discuss] ext3 vs. XFS vs. ....

[steve]

Leroy Tennison wrote:

> Ouch!  I hadn't thought about the consequences of a failure, sounds like 
> you have "been there - done that".  Thanks for the reply, I enjoy the 
> education(s) I get in response to these things.

It's not happened to me personally - but back when I was in college (in
the mid 1970's), there were a bunch of us students sitting in the
terminal room working on the teletypes when there was an ENORMOUS
bang in the computer room.  The flywheel on the motor generator had
simply broken into pieces and one chunk ended up in the Singer
mainframe's power supply.  It went clean through the metal case
(leaving a hole that looked like a bullet hole) and embedded itself
into a capacitor the size of a soda can - which splattered hot, black
tarry electrolyte all over the mainframe's circuitry.

We waited for 20 minutes in the hope that the machine would come back
up (we had no idea what had gone wrong) - until one of the operators
came in with a catboard box full of black-splattered circuit boards
in hand:  "I think the computer is going to be down for a while".

,..The understatement of the century.  The computer never ran again
- and was eventually replaced by some kind of IBM monstrosity.

This actually turned out to be a good thing for me - I had to finish
my project assignment on a DEC PDP 11/45 - which was not usually
available to undergraduates.  It ran UNIX (v6 I think).  I had to
rewrite my Algol-60 program in C.  That was my first exposure to
UNIX and I've been using it pretty much ever since - so I guess that
flywheel did *me* some good.