On Fri, 2 Jul 1999, Akintayo Holder wrote:
> I recently was forced to reboot linux using the reboot button (that
Forced? At gunpoint? (Gnupoimt???) I don't (voluntarily) do GUI, so I
don't know what a reboot button is, but at a guess it does a shutdown
-r now or so. That would unmount the fs, and leave fsck blissfully
unaware that it might have been damaged (if, as it seems, it was).
> sounds wrong). After the reboot my zip drive would not work, when the
> kernel was loading SCSI support their was a Null exception of some kind
> (i think null pointer) followed by a OOPs (and a number) the ppa module
> was listed as being uninitialised. A dmesg showed an error message a
> screen long.
>
> This continued for two boots, then I had a blackout (power outage) and
> the pc went down before i got to it. When I rebooted the error was gone
> and the zip worked (this is why the above description is vague)
A power failure would stop the system without umounting anything, so
when fsck runs on the next boot, it will check as well as it can for
inconsistencies. It might have been able to find and fix some damage
you did that made you want to push that reboot button.
>
> My questions are
> 1. What happened ?
You don't really expect an answer to this, do you? We were only
following orders, and besides, we were somewhere else at the time.
> 2. Does linux fix itself ?
Linux never breaks :-). Sometimes it is able to take evasive actions
against broken hardware and operator head space errors.
> 3. what would cause the kernel to be corrupted ?
Anything. Between boots, a kernel is just a file. If the system
administrator doesn't do anything to stop me, I can copy /dev/zero over
the kernel. Of course, that would stop it cold on the next boot, but if
I really wanted to, I could be a bit more subtle. Whatever you did that
made you think you had to reboot is probably something you don't want to
make a habit of.
> --
> You forgot, once we were brought here, we were robbed of our names,
> robbed of our language. We lost our religion, our culture, our god
> ... and many of us by the way we act, we even lost our minds.
> RH5.2 Personal 17728385
http://www.bigfoot.com/~blakdogg
>
I don't really mean to be insulting. I just have a wierd sense of
humor.
Lawson
>< Microsoft free environment
This mail client runs on Wine. Your mileage may vary.
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