Late night system administration == trouble on SunOS 4.x
Angela Marie Thomas
thomas at shire.cs.psu.edu
Sat Sep 30 15:33:31 AEST 1989
It's another late night of system administration. Tonight the task is
time consuming, but relatively simple: Repartition the disks on a
Sun4/280 running 4.0.3 to distribute the load to a new disk. No big deal.
I partitioned the new disk and dump|restore'd most of the stuff from the
old disk onto it and rebooted off of the new disk. I then proceeded to
repartition and newfs the old disk. No problems so far.
I was about to dump|restore /usr from the new disk back to the old disk
(yes, / and /usr are on two different disks) so I mounted xy0g onto /mnt.
At least, that's what I *intended* to do. My fingers typed "mount
/dev/xy0a /usr" instead. OOPS! Well, no real harm done. I'll just pop
over to /sbin and umount the device. WRONG! It seems that /sbin has
enough programs in it to get you into trouble, but not enough to get you
out of it. No dump, no restore, no umount. I couldn't even
sync;sync;halt the system. Oh, mount is there. I could mount more newly
newfs'd filesystems onto /usr until my face turned blue. I can't believe
it. It was as if I had just stumbled into a cul-de-sac. The only damage
done was to me, not the machine. Sigh.
Sun, if you're listening, please, please, please put statically linked
umount, dump, restore, sync and halt in /sbin. Nine times out of ten,
those are the programs I want when I *need* /sbin.
Angela Thomas NSFNET: thomas at shire.cs.psu.edu
"If you refuse, you die, she dies, everybody dies." --Aard
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