dietmar@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de (Dietmar Braun) writes:

quoted text
>In article <STEVEV.93Apr14005153@miser.uoregon.edu>, stevev@miser.uoregon.edu (Steve VanDevender) writes:
>|> In article <1qfot4$tin@hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu>
>|> ericy@hal.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Eric Youngdale) writes:
>|>
>|>    This is what the bootable rootdisk is for.  I have yet to see
>|>    a good argument for why the bootable rootdisk cannot be used
>|>    instead of specially staticly linked binaries to fix screwups
>|>    with the sharable libraries.
>|> 
>|> A good argument: If you trash the shared libraries you can't even
>|> run sync!  If you use a bootable rootdisk you have to shut the
>|> system down, but you risk filesystem damage because you couldn't
>|> sync first.  shutdown or halt won't work with the shared
>|> libraries gone either.
>|> 

quoted text
>I suggest to have a bootdisk/rootdisk handy and _sync_ as statically linked
>binary. 

  Why not just wait for 30s?  If /etc/update is running (and it should
be on every system), after 30 (or another user/defined value) seconds,
a sync is performed.  If you don't do anything for 30 seconds, there
should be no problem with shutting down (unless you have some daemon
running which is accessing the disk).

quoted text
>I think it's better to maintain a good list of utilities / files
>on a root disk then to discuss some static linking. The reason
>is that static linking doesn't help anyway if you make typing errors
>and delete something valuable. 

  I fully agree with you on this one.  Recovering from a rootdisk is
*much* easier than trying to fix things with only a few static binaries.

quoted text
>I've made a recovery disk as a rootdisk for my 5.25 '' drive. It contains
>no kernel and I could put _everything_ on this disk I need to
>install linux. (tar, gzip, rdev, ln, mkdir, dd, beav ...) 
>And there is enough place left for zcat, less and faq.z :-)

  I find HJ Lu's rootdisk to be an excellent collection.  Also, having
the shared library that the binaries on the hard disk are linked with on
the rootdisk helps a lot, since after (successfully) mounting your hard
disk, you can run the binaries from it, which can be very useful at
times.

  All the best,

  - Nikita -
-- 
Nikita Borisov                                    901-240 Brittany Drive
nvb@sanya.ocunix.on.ca                       Ottawa, ON, Canada  K1K 0R7
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