[Gllug] Building Intranet Kiosks

[Simon Stewart]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2001 at 04:24:00PM +0100, tet at accucard.com wrote:
> 
> >> He quite generously calls sync(), when it's not strictly necessary...
> >
> >Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't syncing three times to disk and
> >then going to run level 0 the "ye olde" way of shutting down a UNIX
> >system?
> 
> Nearly. It was:
> 
> 	sync; sync; sync; <hit big red power button> :-)
> 
> The only reason to run sync 3 times was because the command exited
> before the data could be guaranteed to be flushed to disk. The logic
> was that by the time the third one exited, the first one would have
> been able to finish flushing to disk.

It all comes floating back. When I started with Linux, I remember the
advice was that if the console was rendered inoperable (for example,
by X misbehaving) it was best to wait until the disks had synced
before hitting the big red power button.

Ahhh... those happy minutes waiting for my disk light to flash for
half a second. :)

Cheers,

Simon

-- 
Apr  13 11:05:20 apollo13 fsck[3927]: root, we have a problem.
	  - Jeff Gostin <jgostin at shell2.ba.best.com>

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