On Wed 05 Jul 2006 at 01:13PM, Casper.Dik at Sun.COM wrote:
>
> >Maybe we should be storing an MD5 or similar checksum of
> >the file contents and comparing that, rather than mtime, to
> >know if the file contents have changed relative to the boot
> >archive? The mtime could be used as a hint about whether
> >or not to calculate the checksum, rather than be the final
> >arbiter. Keep it in the SMF profile as a property?
>
>
> Work is underway in this area; including files which need
> to be ignored or otherwise checked.
Great-- I saw a significant problem when I was at JavaOne with
a set of (50) machines that had a troublesome custom USB device
driver-- so, you'd plug in the USB device, the driver would
wedge or crash a little later, and then you'd have to reboot *and* cope
with the now dirty boot archive.
Overall, I have found the boot-archive-is-out-of-date handling to not be
the most friendly of user experiences. Anything we could do to make it
a little more guided would be helpful I think. The "ticking time bomb"
aspect is not my favorite, either-- if an innocent sysadmin plugs a
USB device into a server to load up some files, unplugs it, then
6 months later the machine crashes, then the boot archive is going
to be out of date and the machine is not going to cleanly and
automatically restart itself-- which could increase the customer's
downtime.
Once a day cronjob to update the boot archive?
-dp
--
Daniel Price - Solaris Kernel Engineering - dp at eng.sun.com - blogs.sun.com/dp
