Unit 12 (or unit 11, part 2)

I think the time involved in the standard install has at this point become an extra two hours or less in the overall unit exercises. When considering this exercise in light of the fact that a repository will be around for a while (theoretically), I can’t see how it is that much more time consuming than something ‘off the shelf’ in the short run. In the long run, I’m guessing it’s better to build your repository from scratch as we’ve been doing. Because if you know how something is put together, you’re far more likely to know where to look when it breaks. More than a few times when I was unable to utilize Fugu for transferring files, I had to instead utilize the command line. This was a great learning experience, and I understood the server better after having gone into the files. Once, I could not see an xml file that I had uploaded, and I was able to see the entire XML file when using the command line at the terminal. I was able to practice some of the commands to get inside a particular directory, and this was really helpful.

I have far more confidence in my abilities than I once did, but I know that I have a lot more to learn, and that some of this will be learned on the job. I'm already concerned that next semester I won’t have many opportunities to go into the command line, and I guess that I'm already somewhat wistful for this dark screen:) I do think it would have been better if 675 was right before my capstone project, because I know that in some way I would like to be involved in repository configuration. One thing I’m curious about, do you have the same ability to create snapshots outside of a VM. I’m guessing this would be the typical server backups that most institutions have. Ultimately being able to take snapshots gave me much more confidence through both 672 & 675.