Copying an entire partition to another when both are not of the exact same size (in blocks) can be tricky, especially if that partition includes special files such as /dev/hda and FIFOs.1

Yet, there are several ways to do so:

1. 1. Note that was the case especially in the 90's. As of today, things have come a long way and there are command line options one can use with the cp and tar instructions to copy pretty much anything. You will still have problems with some files such as locks, though. But you should not have to copy them!

Today I got an error 16 with GRUB on one of my machines. This had happened before so I did not worry too much. It is just quite annoying.

A Ubuntu boot CD has a cool feature one can use to rescue such a system (i.e. re-install GRUB properly.) More or less, boot the CD, select the rescue mode, let it do its things for a moment (after you select options like keyboard, etc.)

This is a quick note so I can find the command I need to use to list open files.

My search will work this time.

lsof stands exactly for "LiSt Open Files"

That gives you a list of all the files opened by your system, process by process. It can be useful to know if you are developing a program or if you are limited in the number of files opened at once.

When you use a PostgreSQL database, it gets vacuumed every night (by default on most systems, verify on yours, it may not be the case...) This is a quite simple process to make sure that the database remains fast. And it works great, also. You can have millions of entries and it remains very fast (they have real good algorithms to auto-generate index files as required by your repetitive queries.)