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Re: root's shell



Amos Shapira <amos@gezernet.co.il> writes:

> 
> Alexander L. Belikoff wrote:
> > Nobody cares about a RAM space they'd occupy - they're not intended
> > for everyday use. They are just for *critical* cases.
> 
> But aren't you talking about programs like sh, rm, ls, cp, ln etc,
> which are being used all the time?  I'd like such programs to be
> "cheap" to run.
> 

Sorry, if I was not clear - I was talking about statically-linked
*copies*, not statically-linked replacement. In no way should the end
users suffer from another copy of libc in a RAM. :-) Only if something
critical happened, the sysadmin should be able to run fsck/shell/ls
(at least).

> 
> You should have had libraries on the emergency disk - that's how
> I'd define an emergancy tool - "something which can be usefull and
> self-contained when everything else breaks".
> 

I agree, except that, according to the SunOS administration manual
(back then), the situation when libc.so gets corrupted was considered
as a 'major system corruption' and it was suggested to reinstall the
system - not a big deal for those having a CD-ROM drive or an
appropriate tape drive, but a major pain in the ass for us, since we
didn't have any (you know, it was not a nicest time - the middle of
Perestroika in Russia ;-)

In any case, I perfectly agree with you in that the primary
maintenance tool must be a rescue disk with all needed stuff. But I
prefer covering my ass by making a system *a bit more
crash-recoverable* by having statically-linked copies of the shell and
adm tools.

-- 
-Alexander

==============================================================================
Alexander L. Belikoff			belikoff@bfr.co.il
Berger Financial Research Ltd.
=============================================================================


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