thomas@shire.cs.psu.edu (Angela Marie Thomas) (09/30/89)
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@shire.cs.psu.edu "If you refuse, you die, she dies, everybody dies." --Aard
dupuy@cs.columbia.edu (10/03/89)
> From: thomas@shire.cs.psu.edu (Angela Marie Thomas) > Date: 30 Sep 89 05:33:31 GMT > X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 8, Issue 148, message 5 of 10 > ... 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. No - not a cul-de-sac. A blind alley, perhaps, especially late at night. The right thing to do is to mount a valid /usr filesystem (from anywhere, even nfs) onto any spare directory. Now you have umount, and can umount /usr and try again. @alex