$Header: /CVSROOT/dbm/RANTS,v 1.2 2007-01-18 18:10:50 tino Exp $

Please note that GNU-DBM is not very stable when it comes to irregular
situations, like hard kill of proceses, power-outages while the
database is not synced or parts of the database became corrupt data.

What I would need is a databases as simple as GNU-DBM which is able to
detect which part of the data became corrupt and let you read the
unharmed data while it rejects the wrong data in case something really
weird has happened.  To make it clear what I mean, it shall be able to
extract all still unharmed data from a database db.bad which has been
prepared from a good database "db.ok" as follows:

(
n=$RANDOM
m=$RANDOM
o=$RANDOM
p=`expr $n + $m + $o`
dd bs=256 if=/dev/random count=$n
dd bs=256 if=db.ok       count=$m skip=$n
dd bs=256 if=/dev/random count=$o
dd bs=256 if=db.ok       skip=$p
dd bs=$RANDOM if=/dev/zero count=123
) > db.bad

What I really would like to see is following:

[ plug in USB harddrive as sda.  The data will be killed! ]
# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
# enter-valuable-data-in-database /mnt/db.hooray &
# sleep 20; sync; sleep 100; sync; sleep 200
# dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda count=10000
#
[ NOW UNPLUG THE USB DRIVE *WHILE* IT'S WRITTEN TO !!!! ]
/mnt/db.hooray: write error
kernel panic: cannot access sda, data lost
# umount /mnt
[ plug in USB harddrive again ]
# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
mount: invalid partition table
[ WELL DONE!!! ]
# db-recover /dev/sda db.hooray
[list of all data which is recoverable]

Why do I want this?

Well, you should know, there is nothing in this universe which is
perfectly working.  Errors are normal.  And you know murphy: If there
is something which still works even if something fails the worst, then
a new type of error shows up.  I am bored with all the plain old
common types of errors showing up now and then, I would like to see
some new types of errors.  YKWIM.

-Tino, webmaster@scylla-charybdis.com
$Log: RANTS,v $
Revision 1.2  2007-01-18 18:10:50  tino
Spelling errors corrected

Revision 1.1  2004/08/22 05:52:30  Administrator
Intermediate version for search functionality