Diary (old)

December 31st, 2001

I am hacking away at Mondo v1.35-preN. :) It will feature enhanced tape support, complete with lots of fancy start/stop blocks, extra checksums, etc.

December 28th, 2001

Cafeole has created an IRC channel, #mondo, on irc.openprojects.net (or irc.redhat.com, or..). It's groovy, baby. I'll try to be there most weekends to answer questions and generally goof off.

December 25th, 2001

I am trying Quanta out, to see if it is good enough to replace WebExpress, a Windows application which I use to maintain Mondo's website. It looks great. It is not a WYSIWYG editor but that's OK, I can live without that. It is very groovy.

December 24th, 2001

Mondo v1.34 and Mindi v0.51 are out. Mindi now analyzes the user's keyboard mapping configuration and reproduces it at boot-time. Mondo now lets tape users boot from just one floppy (plus the tape, of course).

BTW, please bear in mind that Mindi and Mondo have to hit a lot of moving targets. If you have even a tiny clue, you'll know that each distro has its own sweet way of doing things. If you e-mail me with a bug report, please bear this in mind.

I am not a complete idiot. I don't release code which doesn't work. If Mondo doesn't work on your PC then perhaps it works on almost everyone else's. Did that occur to you? Oh good. The next user who gives me attitude will get his or her ass kicked. Is that clear?

You get this program for free. (God knows 99.9% of users never gave me anything but static, certainly nothing that folds or jingles.) The least you can do is be civil.

Ironically, the most fucktarded of hapless users won't read the website at all. They'll just e-mail me and say, "Hey, Mondo nearly wiped my system. Please e-mail me soon!" It will inevitably transpire that no, Mondo did not nearly wipe their system. Their Linux distro didn't set their PATH environmental veriable correctly, Mindi couldn't find mkfs.ext2 and it reported a Fatal Error (no, your system is not going to die, dude).

December 22nd, 2001

I am working on implementing some kind of boot-from-tape system. Well, strictly, you're not booting from tape but you're booting from a single floppy and using the beginning of the tape as an extended 'data disk', instead of inserting additional floppies.

December 20th, 2001

Mondo v1.22-5 is out. It is identical to v1.22-4 except that it permits the user to use Mindi v0.50, which is a good idea.

December 19th, 2001

Mondo v1.22-r4 is out. Version 1.22 on the whole is considered stable but I have added a little safety-check in case some users accidentally run mondo-restore from the CD. It's not their fault if it happens; if it does happen, however, Mondo will now warn them and tell them how to avoid it in future.

Mondo v1.33-r8 and Mindi v0.50-4 are also out. The development branch of Mondo can now handle disk partitions as images if that is desired. I have backed up, wiped and nuke-restored my system, treating my Windows partition as an unmountable 'image'. I added the switch:-

# --image-devs /dev/hda1

to my typical call to Mondo. Everything worked like a charm. I would encourage adventurous users to try Mondo v1.33 and Mindi v0.50 to see how they get on.

December 18th, 2001

Mondo v1.33-r7 and Mindi v0.50-3 are out. I have backed up my Windows partition as an image, wiped it, and restored it successfully with this latest version of Mondo. However, I have not yet run a complete backup/wipe/restore cycle with it. Approach the code with caution.

December 15th, 2001

Mondo v1.33-r6 is out. It support disk imaging, kinda sorta. I have tested it a bit and it works OK. (Wow, what a glowing endorsement!) I am going to install Windows NT4 Workstation and run some harder tests next week.

Mondo v1.22-r3 is out, too.

December 14th, 2001

Mondo v1.33-r5 is out. So is Mindi v0.50. They support GRUB experimentally. I am also implementing partition/device imaging support.

December 13th, 2001

Mondo v1.33-r4 is out. It looks great. I have run two full backups and one incremental, in that order. It supports GRUB, too!

December 12th, 2001

I am releasing Mondo v1.3 3 early. It requires the latest Mindi, too. They look good. I have wiped and restored my PC several times using 1.33/0.50 and I have yet to lose data or get any weird error messages.

December 11th, 2001

Mondo v1.22-2 is out. Bugfixes, yada yada. I finally have a job (yippee!) which means I can't spend as much time on Mondo this week as I did last week (boo!). However, v1.33 is nearly ready for release (hooray!).

[manual]

D ecember 9th, 2001

Mindi v0.48-2 is out. It is very soon after v0.48-1, I know, but I think it is worth it. There are a lot of changes - all good, none bad. I have been testing the thing for hours, trying to make it break. It hasn't.

I am also releasing Mondo v1.32-2 because I want people on the mailing list to be able to see what I've been doing all this time. :-) It is totally, 100% not to be trusted! I wiped and restored my system with v1.31 a few days ago and it went more-or-less okay but I have not tested v1.32 at all.

STOP PRESS - I've just backed up and 'nuked' my system using v1.33 (unreleased). It worked perfectly. It even let me rearrange migrate to RAID. Of course, when I rebooted I realized my kernel wasn't quite suitable for RAID. That's okay. The point is, I can move from non-RAID to RAID using Mondo. I haven't backed up and restored a RAID system yet. That is the next test I want to run.

When I trust v1.33, I'll release it and announce it on the mailing list.

Dece mber 8th, 2001

Mondo v1.22 and Mindi v0.48 are out. I have wiped and restored my system using 1.22/0.48 without error. Now, v1.31, on the other hand, gave me a headache. Still, that's why there is a stable branch and a development branch. I was bitten but you needn't be: just stick to 1.2x and you'll be fine.

I have updated the website to thank a few more people. Y'all are so helpful. :-) BTW, Mondo sometimes does funny things if you restore a Red Hat 7.2 system. The bug is in Red Hat 7.2, not Mondo: Mondo will have to work around it. It only crops up if you back up from within rxvt in KDE, wipe, restore and finally boot in runlevel 5. So, yeah, it's pretty obscure. Oh, but the archives are good. :) Anyway, wait 5 minutes and reboot again; it clears itself up. Weird! I'm looking into it.

December 6th, 2001

Mondo v1.21-r3 will be out in a few minutes. It has some important bugfixes, etc. The bugs are obscure and have bitten only one or two people, which is why it took me so long to find them. I did something like this:-

while(tmp[strlen(tmp)-1]<32) { tmp[strlen(tmp)-1]='0'; }

It should have been:-

while(strlen(tmp)>0&&tmp[strlen(tmp)-1]<32) {tmp[strlen(tmp)-1]='0';}

The former would cause an infinite loop under certain circumstances. The latter wouldn't. Needless to say, the fix has been back-ported from the 1.3x development branch to the 1.2x stable branch.

December 5th, 2001

Mondo v1.21-r2 is out. I forgot to add '/mnt/RESTORING' before the call to LILO. I don't know how I missed it. I backed up and restored perfectly with v1.21 last night and LILO ran fine. Oh well.

December 4th, 2001

Mondo v1.21 and Mindi v0.47 are out. I released them earlier than previously discussed because they appear to be stable already. I wiped and restored my PC using 1.21/0.47 today. Everything went fine. There is nothing quite like a list of "Done"s followed by a "All is well; please reboot."

Mondo v1.31 is out, too, if you are feeling adventurous. It includes a nice, new RAID editor but it has not been tested yet.

December 3rd, 2001

Mondo v1.21 (stable) is due out this Sunday. I look forward to wowing y'all with its stunning lack of new features. :-) It is v1.20 plus bugfixes. There were not many bugs in v1.20 anyway, BTW...

Mondo v1.31 (development) has some groovy new code under the hood and some spiffy new features on the dashboard. However, it has not been tested as thoroughly as v1.21 (stable).

December 2nd, 2001

I have added a PayPal button to allow users to contribute financially if they so desire. I am not doing Mondo for the money, as you know. However, it costs money to develop and test Mondo, so I thought it would be a good idea to offer users a way to contribute.

Incidentally, BusyBox's author needs some money to help him buy www.busybox.net; I plan on contributing (no, I haven't yet *g* but I shall) and perhaps you should, too. Just a thought. Mind you, BusyBox is partly sponsored by Lineo, so in a way he is already covered whereas I am not. Still, he is a nice guy and his project rocks.

December 1st, 2001

Mondo v1.21 and Mindi v0.47 are nearly ready. Mondo v1.31 is waiting in the wings with a kick-butt RAID-editing extension to the regular mountlist editor.

I have borrowed an older PC from my father, wiped it, put Linux on it, and configured it as a fileserver. I plan to do funky stuff & make Mondo support NFS-based backup/restore. The server is named Wu-tang and my workstation is named Eminem. Do you see a pattern?

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