Re: [vcf-midatlantic] Museum Report 7/16 & 7/17
On 07/19/2016 08:53 PM, Bill Sudbrink via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Originally, if I recall correctly, it was:
sync sync sync halt
Yea, later on, all that fancy "shutdown -h" really made the sync's unnecessary.
The syncs were never actually necessary.
But, can you really trust the jerk who wrote the shutdown routine?
Generally speaking, yes. ;)
Slightly changing subjects, I don't recall ever seeing the system in question. The first 68K *nix box I ever played with was a Masscomp. An MC-500 if memory serves. Is that the machine we're talking about here?
No, the AT&T UNIX PC 7300, a.k.a. the 3B1. It was by no means the first 68K-based UNIX system, of course. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
Dave McGuire wrote:
On 07/19/2016 08:53 PM, Bill Sudbrink via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Originally, if I recall correctly, it was:
sync sync sync halt
Yea, later on, all that fancy "shutdown -h" really made the sync's unnecessary.
The syncs were never actually necessary.
Hate to argue with you, but in BSD, "back in the old days" I think "halt" was "right now", no cleanup, no dirty writes, just a little better than yanking the cord out of the wall. Bill S.
I agree, they weren't necessary. It's partly habit for me when dealing with old UNIX boxes. An old friend who ran the VMS and Unix machines where I work (and gave a ton of stuff away in the '90s) did it for the Solaris systems there — probably as a matter of habit — and of course I picked some of that up. We ran a SPARC lab until the late 2000s — unfortunately on Blade 150s, which aren't all that great. I did manage to write a NetBoot system install script for a platform that only had the Bourne Shell and deploy it, though :) The UNIX PC seems to have a reasonable shutdown script anyway (there is no "halt" only "shutdown" — it does appear rather advanced for its time), so even if this was useful somewhere it probably wouldn't be on that platform. But, old machines (where you don't necessarily know what you're dealing with) and habit :) David R
On Jul 19, 2016, at 20:57, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
On 07/19/2016 08:53 PM, Bill Sudbrink via vcf-midatlantic wrote: Originally, if I recall correctly, it was:
sync sync sync halt
Yea, later on, all that fancy "shutdown -h" really made the sync's unnecessary.
The syncs were never actually necessary.
But, can you really trust the jerk who wrote the shutdown routine?
Generally speaking, yes. ;)
Slightly changing subjects, I don't recall ever seeing the system in question. The first 68K *nix box I ever played with was a Masscomp. An MC-500 if memory serves. Is that the machine we're talking about here?
No, the AT&T UNIX PC 7300, a.k.a. the 3B1. It was by no means the first 68K-based UNIX system, of course.
-Dave
-- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
On 07/19/2016 09:10 PM, David Ryskalczyk via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
I agree, they weren't necessary. It's partly habit for me when dealing with old UNIX boxes.
I'm going to be the dissenting voice, I will agree it shouldn't be necessary. But in less than 1% of the machines I reboot (probably 0.01% to be honest) the sync has save my file system. It usually comes into play when there's a bug in the FS software and the shutdown occurs. You know when the shutdown hangs and you don't get those kind reassuring words '$ ' ;-). It actually occurs when the filesystem is being unmounted. I've seen this occur on a few USB drives. Understand that I sometimes play with the beta software. Guess I got what I deserved. ;-) And yes, it's habit, when I was a young sys admin and taught the ways of the long beard. PS: I am also of the habit of doing a ^Zwr mem<Enter> on cisco routers when I edit the config editor. And a ^X^W^X^C in emacs. I've never really gotten the hang of vi, so that one I need to think about. -- Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry ncherry@linuxha.com http://www.linuxha.com/ Main site http://linuxha.blogspot.com/ My HA Blog Author of: Linux Smart Homes For Dummies
participants (4)
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Bill Sudbrink -
Dave McGuire -
David Ryskalczyk -
Neil Cherry