On 26 Apr 2001, Iggy Drougge wrote:
> I have no respect for a system which needs to be pampered before one
> may hit the power switch, so nowadays, I just flick the switch when
> I feel like it, be the system Windows, Mac or UNIX. Haven't had the
> opportunity with VMS yet. =)
If that UNIX is Solaris 8, be prepared to fskc some filesystems
manually when you power it back on. Even on my FreeBSD box and older
Sun 4 that's running Solaris 2.4, both of which tend to come back up
without any problems after a power failure, I still try to do a proper
shutdown and halt... and yes, I still issue three sync commands before
halting the system. Laugh at this superstition if you want to, but
doing that on my Ultra running Solaris 8 seems to be the only way to
get it to prepare it for powering off so that I don't have to do a
manual fsck that prompts me for a lot of repetetive questions.
Has anyone else here found older versions of Solaris on older hardware
to be more stable?
Anyway, to those running UNIX systems who are used to PeeCees running
simpler operating systems and software, a word of advice: UNIX systems
often have many processes running, some of which very well may be in
the middle of writing to your hard disk when you switch the system off
without a proper shutdown... particularly if you've got lots of things
running like a database, have lots of cron jobs, have Apache running,
etc. But, if you enjoy flirting with disaster and have good
backups...
--
Copyright (C) 2001 R. D. Davis The difference between humans & other animals:
All Rights Reserved an unnatural belief that we're above Nature &
rdd_at_perqlogic.com 410-744-4900 her other creatures, using dogma to justify such
http://www.perqlogic.com/rdd beliefs and to justify much human cruelty.
Received on Thu Apr 26 2001 - 09:46:45 BST