I live in a part of this world where uninteruupted power for even a single
day is a strange thing. Every day or the other power dies while I am
running linux.
Fortunately, contrary to what many people believe, linux is not that
vulnerable to this. I have been using linux for most of my time for about
6 months, statistically I guess there were 60-80 improper shutdowns. I got
into serious trouble only 3 times. Excepting these 3, e2fsck done
excellent job at boot time.
Now about these 3 times. Every time the problems were same. When it came
to somewhere near mounting filesystems, linux gave an error message saying
it can't read utmp/wtmp, or that they did not exist. They reside in the
/var directory. Indeed if you boot with a boot disk then, those cute files
don't exist.
At the first 2 times, I had little experience with linux. So, I had to
re-install, a great pain, but anyone working for long times on Win* has it
in his habit. The last time I got a bit smart, booted from floppy, and
'touch' ed those files. There were some other problems, but the system
recovered somehow. I still don't know how, but I am using that system for
over a month.
SUGGESTION: Keep the top level directories on different partitions. I have
it like this :-
partition directory
1 /
2 /var
3 /home
4 /usr
5 swap
I think it will reduce the chance for losing everything. Even if your /var
or root gets oopsed, you still have your data intact on /home. For
important data, always keep backups on other partitions.
CONCLUSION: A UPS is very strongly recommended. But if you can't afford it
(like me) there is no reason to shy away from linux. It will give less
problems than Winies on power failures.
On Sun, 6 Sep 1998, Dane Helm wrote:
> Date: Sun, 6 Sep 1998 15:24:12 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Dane Helm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: Linux Newbie List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Improper shutdowns
>
> What are somethings to expect from improper shutdowns? I live in an are
> were power can be unrelable some times of the year (winter). I want to
> see some of the things I might face...
>
>
