[ale] Need an iso to wipe hard drives.

JK jknapka at kneuro.net
Thu Apr 22 17:49:52 EDT 2010


On 4/22/2010 3:05 PM, Chris Fowler wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-04-21 at 21:16 -0600, JK wrote:
>>
>> I learned that too, on my first day as a Unix (SunOS 4) admin in grad
>> school. "sync ; sync ; sync ; shutdown -h now".
>
> Same on SCO.
>
> Why?  Did shutdown not flush all buffers and umount the file system?
> Maybe we were just being paranoid?


I think we were.  Surely Kernighan et al were smart enough to
get the semantics of shutdown() right from the very start.
Or else there's some subtle reason shutdown() can't sync,
in which case pre-shutdown syncs would really be necessary.

-- JK


-- 
Forget Jesus: stars died so that you could be here today.
  - physicist Lawrence Krauss


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