karl@sugar.hackercorp.com (Karl Lehenbauer) (06/13/90)
I don't know where I got the impression that the maddening and near- worthless "There may be a system dump memory image in the swap device. Do you want to save it?" message was part of the kernel or boot binary -- it isn't. (The message is bogus because the whole thing is bogus -- 99% of the time there is not a dump in the swap space, and if the routine that did the dump just wrote some kind of header out there, like "THIS IS A DUMP", and the header wasn't there, the system could KNOW that there wasn't a dump.) (It's maddening because your system sits there waiting for you to physically type into the keyboard to tell it not to dump the nonexistent dump. Meanwhile your system does nothing.) How was that for building tension? OK, OK, I'll tell. It's a shell script in /etc called dumpsave. Just make dumpsave do an 'exit 0' before it asks the question. I include a context diff below for the terminally lazy. cd to /etc and patch away. Probably a good idea to make a backup copy. *** odumpsave Wed Jun 13 00:37:48 1990 --- dumpsave Wed Jun 13 00:41:56 1990 *************** *** 22,27 # echo 'There may be a system dump memory image in the swap device.' while : do echo 'Do you want to save it? (y/n)> \c' --- 22,33 ----- # echo 'There may be a system dump memory image in the swap device.' + + # the following three lines cause the dump to be skipped + echo "But there probably isn't." + echo "So I'll just blow it off." + exit 0 + while : do echo 'Do you want to save it? (y/n)> \c' -- -- uunet!sugar!karl -- Usenet access: (713) 438-5018
cpcahil@virtech.uucp (Conor P. Cahill) (06/13/90)
In article <5887@sugar.hackercorp.com> karl@sugar.hackercorp.com (Karl Lehenbauer) writes: > >(It's maddening because your system sits there waiting for you to physically >type into the keyboard to tell it not to dump the nonexistent dump. Meanwhile >your system does nothing.) > >It's a shell script in /etc called dumpsave. > >Just make dumpsave do an 'exit 0' before it asks the question. Instead of using an exit 0, why not set up a timeout with the following: (sleep 10; kill $$) & So that you have a 10 second chance to save the dump if there really is one. -- Conor P. Cahill (703)430-9247 Virtual Technologies, Inc., uunet!virtech!cpcahil 46030 Manekin Plaza, Suite 160 Sterling, VA 22170