Incoming from T:

Caveat: I'm not grml. :-)

• 2nd, an OT question. Does Debian or grml support some kind of integrity

test? My current situation is that after so many damn power failures, my lovely Debian is in an unstable stage, commands that used to work are now failing mystically. Re-install the packages that contain those tools won't help. I'm now forced to do a reinstallation after having my ever-upgrading-and-customizing Debian for so many years...

*Every* Linux I've used (since 1993) has always been able to notice on boot whether the system had been shut down gracefully (filesystems unmounted and marked "clean"), or if the system had crashed. In the latter case, if / is dirty, it comes up in single user, expects you (or itself) to run fsck, then reboots with a clean / and continues to check the rest of the filesystems.

In thirteen years running ext2, I've never found it incapable of recovering completely, and I've had some flakey hardware let me tell you!

I wish Debian or grml has the integrity testing capability that rpm has, ie. to test whether the libs/executables that reside on the disk are still

I run a md5sum once a week, saving the output to file. Doing a diff on that file against the previous week's shows me anything that's changed. You're welcome to the script if you'd like it. It's 36 lines of perl (plus copious comments).

* T mlist4suntong@yahoo.com [20060628 20:55]:

• 1st, does grml support read-only root fs? If not please put it

into todo list.

That's pretty useless. Use the live-cd if you don't want to touch files on your harddisk.

Since it is a Live distro, supporting read-only root fs should be trivial, but I need it badly. I have reiserfs for my root fs, but still that can't sustain the frequent power failure that I'm having.

reiserfs, bad choice for your root-fs...

• 2nd, an OT question. Does Debian or grml support some kind of integrity

test? My current situation is that after so many damn power failures, my lovely Debian is in an unstable stage, commands that used to work are now failing mystically. Re-install the packages that contain those tools won't help. I'm now forced to do a reinstallation after having my ever-upgrading-and-customizing Debian for so many years... I wish Debian or grml has the integrity testing capability that rpm has, ie. to test whether the libs/executables that reside on the disk are still the same as in the package. This might help for situations like what I'm experiencing, or HD failure, and potential compromised systems...

man debsums

regards, -mika-