4.3 BSD VAX 11/750 does not seem to sync its disks.

[David Elliott]

In article <10900 at mimsy.UUCP> chris at mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) writes:
>In article <271 at usfvax1.UUCP> brankley at usfvax1.UUCP (Bob Brankley) writes:
>>I have been having a pretty wild problem on my VAX 11/750 running 4.3
>>BSD ....  I originally found the problem when my nightly "fsck" of the
>>file system detected multiple UNREFerenced files in the partition
>>containing my user files(/dev/ra0g).
>
>You cannot run fsck on an active file system.  Among other things,
>it should not be necessary.  Stop doing it.

Sadly, 4.3BSD comes this way.  /usr/adm/daily.sh (an otherwise great
way of doing periodic chores, superior to crontab, anyway) runs
/etc/fsck with the -n option.  Sure, the sync command is executed
first, but that doesn't guarantee anything at all.

When we first brought up 4.3BSD, we kept this new "feature".  After
a while, it got really annoying when we happened to be running news
expires at the same time.

As a side note, our next System V-based release contains a special
"periodic execution" interface for administrators, using an interface
similar to the rc directory interface in System V.  Anyone wanting
information can contact me.
-- 
David Elliott		dce at mips.com  or  {ames,prls,pyramid,decwrl}!mips!dce