jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens) (10/01/90)
(Note the cross-posting and Followup-To. Installing new kernels and rebooting the system is, in my opinion, a system administration issue.) In article <1990Sep29.162137.23912@mp.cs.niu.edu>, rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes: |> You can use 'wall' to scare the users of before you rename the kernel images. |> At the same time create /etc/.nologin to prevent new logins. |> Next you can umount all of the disk partitions, so that on reboot only |> the root partition should be checked. Finally do the rename and reboot. First of all, it's /etc/nologin on most systems, not /etc/.nologin. Second, you can do "shutdown -k +5 Installing a new kernel" (at least you can do this with the 4.3BSD shutdown; I don't know about more SYSV-like systems) and shutdown will automatically send out the wall messages and create /etc/nologin with the appropriate comments in it. When the five minutes expired, it will simply go away, rather than actually rebooting (That's the -k option. From the man page: "If it isn't obvious, -k is to make people think the system is going down!"). -- Jonathan Kamens USnail: MIT Project Athena 11 Ashford Terrace jik@Athena.MIT.EDU Allston, MA 02134 Office: 617-253-8495 Home: 617-782-0710