[colug-432] Solid State Drives (was: SMART HDD Status)

[Rob Stampfli]

On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 06:17:24PM -0500, Rob Funk wrote:
> On Thursday, February 23, 2012 06:01:56 PM Rob Stampfli wrote:
> >   To my horror, I started finding discrepancies in what should be
> > static files, like those in /var/cache, and they became more and more
> > prevalent with each succeeding backup.  (For some reason, these errors
> > seemed to cluster in /var/cache.  I found no errors at all in /bin,
> > /usr/bin, /sbin, /usr/sbin, or /etc files.)  But, these bit errors were
> 
> I think you're working off a bad premise. There's no reason at all that 
> /var/cache should be static files. The whole point of it being in /var is that 
> it could change at any time. I don't even see a point to backing up 
> /var/cache.

To clarify, I should have stated I was specifically referring to the .deb
files in /var/cache/apt/archives.  (Actually, there is not a lot more than
this in /var/cache on this particular system -- it's a fairly focused
server.)

The affected deb files also did not verify anymore.  pkgcache.bin and
srcpkgcache.bin also had errors.  I know these last two aren't static,
but they should not become corrupted (requiring regeneration) either.
In all cases where two generations of these files differed, I did verify
that the inode info (mtime, ctime, size, etc.) didn't change to weed out
any patches applied in the interim, so I do believe these bit errors were
not explainable as routine.

Rob