I find that most of my problems figuring out how to do something:
1) How to properly classify the problem
2) Where to find the information once it's classified
For example, I have 2 machines that I run. One is this server and one is my desktop box. Both run Linux. Now, I've had some circuit breaker issues for reasons that I haven't been able to figure out. When the power goes out, both machines go down unceremoniously. I'm convinced that this has been the cause of quite a few of my HD failures in the past few years. Anyway, the other bad part is that neither of them have any "remember your power state" settings in the BIOS. So, when I'm away, if the power goes off, the machine(s) stay off until I can return and turn them off. This isn't a big deal for my desktop machine, but for my server it's really annoying.
I'm building a new server, and that mobo's BIOS doesn't even have that nice "power on A/C loss" setting. What it does have is a bazillion ways to power it back on: USB, network, etc. What I'm trying to do now is get an advance UPS so that it will stay on in case the power is just a flicker. If it's not, it'll take a command to shut down.
What would you call that? UPS command? Power management? Auto-shutdown? I don't even begin to know where to start googling.
To point 2, once you've even got the terms, sometimes it's hard to know where to search for it. You have to scope the problem. Is it a kernel issue? A distro issue? A software issue? How much of the software is a distro-specific thing?
Sometimes the possibilities are truly staggering. What I'm therefore going to try and do is be a Linux doc link site. There have been FAQ's on various forums, but I'd like to join them all together. Sometimes, the Gentoo people have something figured out that the Fedora people might like to know. My plan is to have more links on the left to help out.
Posted by flynn at October 3, 2007 4:16 PM