On Monday 01 October 2007 23:13, Jim Crilly wrote: > On 10/01/07 05:15:27PM -0500, C M Reinehr wrote: > > I've seen the term before but don't understand exactly what COW means, > > but I think I know what you're talking about. I had a failing disk drive > > last Friday and had to boot my system off of a Knoppix disk to see what I > > could salvage from my raid-1 array. Knoppix didn't seem to include the > > smartmontools package but I was able to use apt-get to install it on the > > fly and use it to diagnose which disk was failing. > > COW stands for copy on write, whenever a change is made to a block (or > file maybe, I don't know what granularity unionfs uses) that block is > copied somewhere else and the original left in place so that the update > can succeed and the original still exists. Sort of like an LVM snapshot > only instead of being backed by a LVM volume the changes are only stored in > memory. > > But yea, the short answer is that it allows you to make changes and install > software on read-only medium like CDs. =) > > Jim.
Thanks, Jim! :-) -- Debian 'Etch' - Registered Linux User #241964 -------- "More laws, less justice." -- Marcus Tullius Ciceroca, 42 BC -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
