How do I create a microcore dev box that I can easily SSH into?

[beerstein]

Hi: This posts are great and helped me a lot to understand the inner workings of the
backup and restore process.
Here is another question:

status: I boot TC 3.5 from CD and have a /tce with about 500 MB sitting on /hda1 FAT 32
waiting to be loaded during boot. This takes about 2 minutes. Not too bad. But when I
shut down and backup it takes about 10 - 15 miniutes until the system comes to a complete stop.

question: Would it help if I create two more directories on /hda1 named:

/home

/opt

and the copy the data from /tce/opt  and /home/tc into this folders?

May I do that or is this a no-no?

If not is there any other way to speed up the shut-down process?

Thank you and have a ggod day

[gerald_clark]

If you wish to do this, you should really boot from HD.
Then you need to add two boot options:
home=hdXN opt=hdXN
where XN are drive letter and partition number.
First time you boot with these options, home and opt
will automatically be populated from your backup.
You then need to edit /opt/.filetool.lst to remove any lines
for home or opt.

[tinypoodle]

If I were you, before changing anything I would rather be keen to diagnose what on earth could cause a delay of 10-15'(!!) to shutdown   

You are not mentioning many relevant details, e.g. what are the specs of your PC? What is the size of your mydata.tcz?

Do a backup and time it (not before shutdown) - to see to which extent backup per se is responsible for such a long shutdown time.

[beerstein]

Hi again:
I have an "old" Celeron 775 MHz, 20 GB HD with some other Oses on it and
256 MB of RAM.
mydate.tcz is about 450 MB
The total /tce is about the same -

I installed several extensions and put a lot of work in it and I do not want to start from scratch again. I would like to keep that work I have done and put it on a hard drive - if necessary even onto another PCs hard drive  in the network.
I just did that with this configuration a few days before- I copied the /tce over from another machine - I like to move with all my "fun baggage" to other PCs and have all my extensions available.
Sound weired but I love it

[thane]

My usual mydata.tgz is only 1M  (mainly browser settings/bookmarks). I recently installed a fairly large (non-TC) application to my home directory and even with that the mydata.tgz was only ~100 M (I later took it out of backup and saved it somewhere else). 450 M seems to me to be an enormous size. Is your browser creating files you don't really need to backup? Is there any static content in your home etc. directory you can put somewhere else? I created a directory under /mnt/sda1/tce (I boot and save from USB) for download files that aren't modified. Could you do something similar so you don't need the huge backup? Just a thought.

[Rich]

Hi beerstein
Tinypoodle is right, there is something seriously wrong here. Writing 450MB in 10 minutes
works out to 750KB/sec, if memory serves, even the old ST506  drives from 30 years ago
could do 5MB/sec. I noticed the word "network" in one of your posts. Are you mounting any
network drives in your home directory, or in any path included in your filetool.lst file?

[tinypoodle]

Hi beerstein
Tinypoodle is right, there is something seriously wrong here. Writing 450MB in 10 minutes
works out to 750KB/sec, if memory serves, even the old ST506  drives from 30 years ago
could do 5MB/sec.

Not quite.
Write speed is close to negligible in relation to analogy of time used for gzipping the backup.
Achieving a 450MB gzipped tarball within 10-15' sounds about right to me.
This can easily be tested and verified by untarring one's mydata.tgz and then timing tarring and gzipping separately  

[tinypoodle]

Hi again:
I have an "old" Celeron 775 MHz, 20 GB HD with some other Oses on it and
256 MB of RAM.
mydate.tcz is about 450 MB

By default there is no such case to be expected.
Default size of tmpfs mounted over / = 90% of RAM.

Please post output of

Code: [Select]

showbootcodes
free
P.S.: This thread, as much as it is particular to TC, as much it has gone astray from the original topic. Perhaps an admin could split it off.

[Rich]

@tinypoodle: My point was that he is running an internal hard drive yet quoting the type
of numbers I would get with my USB 1.1 pen drive. And while 10-15 seconds sounds
right he said 10-15 minutes.

[tinypoodle]

@tinypoodle: My point was that he is running an internal hard drive yet quoting the type
of numbers I would get with my USB 1.1 pen drive. And while 10-15 seconds sounds
right he said 10-15 minutes.

I extrapolated based on timing my own backup, which is 4-5 secs resulting in 2152KB (done on internal SATA), so 450MB would 10-15' look within a similar rate to me.

[Rich]

Hi tinypoodle
That's interesting, I just timed the 10MB backup to my USB 1.1 pen drive and it took 26 seconds.
Based on that it sounds like your backups to SATA should be much faster.

[tinypoodle]

I can't follow...
your backup is ~5x bigger in size than mine and takes ~5x in time, no?

[Rich]

I untarred my backup then tarred and zipped, it took 14 seconds. So in this case write
time is not negligible. Did not realize zip time was this long.

[tinypoodle]

Backup is gzip'ed, not zip'ed.

[Rich]

You are correct and that is what I used, I got sloppy in writing the correct words.