This is a very interesting reply, chiefly because it demonstrates how
people working in different areas can have a very different focus. I'll
attempt to do it justice.
>I love replies like this. I haven't quoted the whole beast -- as some of
>it is valid, but let me tell you that I earn tons of money from people
>who follow such suggestions. I fix things for a living, like the list
>mom, and bunches of others who live on this list. And we all can tell
>you stories of blown serial port circuitry, scsi chips and yes, even adb
>ports (with the exception of one beast noted previously: the adb on a
>wallstreets).
This is what I mean by a different focus. The thing about fixing things for
a living is that you see a lot of broke things. ;) Everyone develops a
particular paranoia related to their own specialty, and I must point out
that this is yours. However, I'd like to hear specific criticisms (without
quoting the whole beast), both to further the discussion and correct any
misconceptions I have (one respondent has already given me a better
understanding of SCSI swappability, or the lack thereof).
>Now for my advice: never, ever follow the advice outlined in the above
>partially quoted posting. Always shut down. Always. How much is your
>time worth, anyway? Is it worth blown hardware: I've never heard from a
>desperate client who said -- "geez, am I glad I pulled that cable, saved
>myself 2 minutes of boot time, and have caused a week's delay due to my
>impatience."
This week my own time is worth about $80/hour Canadian (Unix
system-building contracts and network security consulting). Admittedly it
was "worth less" when I chose to work fulltime with it, and two minutes to
shutdown and reboot is still a mere $2.50 (to my clients mind you), but you
can see that it adds up pretty quickly. A better example is the time I've
spent running various Unix boxes (some of them PCs) with easily two or
three hundred simultaneous users. Though it might be the most absolutely
prudent thing to shut the box down to swap a serial device, it wouldn't
likely be appreciated by those people - in fact, if my experience tells me
I have a 99% chance of getting away with a SCSI hotswap, it may still be
worth my and everyone else's while. Equipment is actually pretty cheap,
while time is the only irreplaceable thing (sounds like a koan, I know).
Now there's obviously a different quantitative balance with someone's home
computer, for which they don't keep spare motherboards around, but the
rules are the same, and a different decision will only be a matter of scale.
>I rarely wish to ever appear to flame my respected colleagues on this or
>any list, but this has to be the WORST advice I've ever seen posted (even
>worse than advising to buy a Windows machine 'cause it's so much easier
>to use and configure).
While I also respect your opinion in this even while disagreeing with it
(as I'm trying to make clear), I think you may have overstated this a bit.
We've both seen much, much worse advice (grin).
>As for power connectors, the author is generally correct. But most
>anything else, even if it says it is hot-swappable, should be sensably
>powered down before swapping out cables or modules. I have repaired most
>lines of Macs at the board level -- I'm not just blowing air up anyone's
>skirt here. I've even seen a 3400 blow the ide card on a 6 Gb hard drive
>when the CD drive replaced the internal floppy module. That was 5.5
>gigabytes of unbacked-up information. The card blew, not the extent
>table, not some damn directory. And the client paid handsomely for some
>magic recovery. Respect your toys, folks -- or pay for it big time.
Here you get into some reproducability and causation issues. If a card or
CMOS part is going to blow, it's going to blow when power is applied. Parts
are built to a certain tolerance, and nothing lasts forever (blame
marketroids for glossing over these basic facts). I suspect your dead IDE
controller's number was up, and that's that (in fact even if the data is
un-backed-up I'd actually rather lose the card and know the soft data is
safe though momentarily inaccessible, as compared to a wiped directory -
again, hardware is generally easier to fix or replace than painstakingly
sifting through 5GB of who-knows-what, and money is cheaper than time).
Everyone has to decide on the real percentage chance that "this part I'm
relying on" will die today, and on how their own actions will affect that
chance. I know enough about my own experience and about IT in general to be
able to give a middle-line report on the reality of hardware death, and I
have no problem with my posting in that light. In some fairly specialised
circumstances that advice would be wholly inappropriate, but those people
probably shouldn't be using a Duolist question-and-answer session to decide
on personal or site policy. The fact is that most things on a Powerbook
(with the noted exceptions) can be plugged and unplugged pretty freely
without raising the incidence of harm past a very reasonable level.
Further, I think it does people a disservice to give opposite advice that
will likely only instill undeserved fear and uncertainty, and lead them to
waste a great deal of time (in toto) for very little real-world benefit.
Unrealistically paranoid policy usually has the long-term effect of
creating a total disregard for reasonable prudence. And the best part is
that in that final note you can see my own bias, as a computer security
geek. ;)
--
Marc Sira | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"If you can't play with words, what good are they?"
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