[Nottingham] Oops

[Robert Davies]

On Wednesday 22 Oct 2003 18:47, Tom Bird wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Oct 2003, Graeme Fowler wrote:
> > I did, that's why I said "decoded". I simply wanted a second (or
> > more!)opinion on what it might have been. As it tunred out my vague
> > suspicions appeared well-founded in that it turned out - or at least
> > seems that way - to have been a corrupt swap partition.
> >
> > I switched swap off, dd'd /dev/zero to it to flatten it, recreated swap
> > again and switched it back on. The server's been lovely ever since :)
>
> Gosh, and I'd assumed the swap partition got restarted afresh every time
> it was brought into service.  Learn something new every month :)

No, you have to run mkswap(8), swap partitions have traditionally been used as 
places to save crash dumps, or suspend to, so you wouldn't want it 
re-initialised every time.

Rob