Parolski.com

I’m sure my readers at some time or another have had the pleasure of installing Windows XP. They will also probably had the pleasure of having to wait 3/4 of an hour for it to finish! Well, there is a solution!

Furthering the idea of putting the disk install image in RAM before installing, why not write to a Virtual hard drive, also in RAM (if your using VirtualBox)! Specify /tmp as the prefix to your disks name in the “Virtual Disk Location and Size” dialogue window. The result? An installation of windows that will reboot in about 15 seconds. Of course, this is good for some tasks, but not all! Your millage will vary!

NOTE01: I would recommend your have at least 3GB of RAM before trying this!

NOTE02: If you want to keep the install for good, you will need to copy it off /tmp before you reboot, otherwise your virtual drive will be gone!

I must admit though, it still wont solve any post-install issues!

You need execute permission on a directory to cd to it! Is read not enough? In practice, no. The chdir system call requires execute permission to make that directory the starting point for path searches. According to the chdir (system call, section 2) man page:

For a directory to become the current directory, a process
must have execute (search) access to the directory.

So when trussing the output of a failed cd to a directory with no execute permissions we see:

chdir("lala") Err#13 EACCES [file_dac_search]
chdir("lala") Err#13 EACCES [file_dac_search]

and as the man page goes on to say:

EACCES Search permission is denied for any com-
ponent of the path name.

Reading this article explains, that of course you can’t execute a directory but rather, that the execute permission bit is reused for different purposes. Without execute permission on the directory, you can’t stat() any files within the directory. Opening, deleting and other operations on a file first require you to stat() it first, as stat() gives you the files inode. Without the files inode, theres very little you can do with it!

Armed with this knowledge you might feel inspired to check out the source code of this call for yourself!

One thing I found out about the Solaris OS is that regardless of system load or runlevel, you could always ping the box. Even when you rm -rf / Ok, so that wasn’t always true, somtimes it was powered off, but its pretty close. Solaris appears to have gained another ability……Despite a “failed” install of build 78 of OpenSolaris which collapsed at 85% completion, the machine still appears to have installed well. It boots, JDS works fine, ZFS is happy, and nothing has crashed (yet). This is another shining example why those guys down in the Sun labs deserve a pay rise!!! Now, if only they could fix a gigabit ethenet bug thats affecting me……