seth vidal wrote: > On Tue, 2003-03-18 at 09:22, Troy Dawson wrote: > >>seth vidal wrote: >> >>>out of curiosity is there anyone out there still USING lilo? >>> >> >>Yes, it is used quite extensivly here at Fermilab. For all our releases it is >>our default. >>Why? >>There are two main reasons. >> >>First is that all our users are used to it and all their old tricks work. For >>instance, to get into single user mode, you just type 'linux single', while >>for grub you have to edit your files, and put in 'single', which is a whole >>lot more painful. > > > but grubby! grubby is your friend. > > Just add a new section for it. > The problem is, that the times that you need it is when you can't get on the machine. Such as when you accidentally turned you entire firewall on with no holes, and AFS is taking 15 minutes to time out. Or you did a 71 to 73 upgrade to find that the pam modules didn't upgrade correctly and you're locked out. But ... users are gradually learning ... and when these things happen, I or someone who does know grub, usually get called anyway. > > >>On the same point, grub is horrendously documented. If anything it is so over >>documented that you can't find what you are looking for. The documentation >>was written for a coder, not for your average user wanting to find out how to >>get into single user mode, or something like that. >> >>Second, is that there is no -R command. This might seem trivial, and I think >>it is, but the fact of the matter is, that there is lots of times, that I want >>to just boot into a partition once, and when I am in that partition I have no >>way to access the place where the grub file is. So after I'm done, I have to >>sit there and wait at the desk until it boots up. This is especially tricky >>when I'm not even at the machine in question, and I'm doing everything remotely. >> > > > > there is a -R command > > from the grub changelog from 7.3 > add patch from GRUB mailing list from Keir Fraser to add a --once flag > to savedefault function so that you can have the equivalent of lilo -R > functionality (use 'savedefault --default=N --once' from the grub shell) > Aha ... I knew someone would be doing it. It is such a helpful command. It'll take me a bit to get the time to incorporate this, maybe by then it will be in the real release. hmmm ... Thanks for the info Troy -- __________________________________________________ Troy Dawson dawson@xxxxxxxx (630)840-6468 Fermilab ComputingDivision/OSS CSI Group __________________________________________________
