On Sep 11, 2009, at 10:36 AM, Larry Uher wrote:
I guess my question would be why is a complex EXEC needed to do a normal system administration task? A second question is why didn't Novell provide a straightforward method for doing this and document it in a manual (without using a complex 3rd party EXEC) ?
Complex? After the description and the license and update comment blocks, it's about 240 lines. Of those, about 120 are the various ways the program can exit (with descriptive text) and the help message. That leaves about 120 lines of actual code, and those lines are not dense (e.g. one line per pipe stage). That handles both the raw FBA and the DIAG device cases. It's not a normal system administration task on any other Linux architecture. It's really quite unusual for your swap device to be destroyed and recreated every time you power on the machine. In the normal case the swap signature sits there between power cycles. That's why Dave and I wrote the thing in the first place--Linux does not generally consider needing to format the swap device as part of its normal bootup routine and rather than mess with system startup scripts and their ordering, we thought it was a lot easier to just take care of it in CMS before handing control to Linux, so that the swap device was pre-prepared like it expected. And that, by the way, is the reason Novell doesn't do it: it's not a task that's necessary on other architectures, and Novell, not surprisingly, likes to keep as much the same between platforms as possible. Adam ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
