REQ: approaches to stability

["Pete St. Onge" <pete@seul.org>]

Hi all,
     The discussion about maintaining linux and the expertise required
has started me thinking about my own problem. Recently, one of the
drives on a linux box I run went wacko; errors started cropping up like
mad and I lost the bootable partition. To prevent this happening in the
future, I've been thinking about ways in which I could set up the
machine to 'dual-boot' such that if the bootable partition were hosed
that I could set up the machine so that I could boot off of another one
and do damage control.
     I would greatly appreciate any hints, tips or suggestions anyone
might have, any experiences folks would care to share.
     In passing, on the subject of managing a linux box, I've found that
webmin (www.webmin.com) is pretty useful for a lot of daily tasks
(mounting and unmounting, user management, permissions, etc...). It took
me a few times to get it set up because I wanted to compile in support
for SSLeay, but after a couple of tries I got it right. It was working
quite nicely on said box - mostly for mounting and unmounting a
removable disk - until the drive freaked out on me. :(

     Cheers,

     Pete

-- 
Pete St. Onge - McGill U.  Limnology - Fun with Ropes & Buckets
pete@seul.org                  http://wwp.mirabilis.com/4322052
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