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Re: root's shell



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

> 
> Alexander L. Belikoff wrote:
> 
> > As for the disk space, trust me, they'll fit into 2-3 Meg perfectly
> > (on Intel systems).
> 
> But they will take up that much space of RAM too, and since they are
> used a lot these are exactly the utils you would like to minimize.
> Also you'd like to save as much space on rescue disks as you can,
> and that's were shared libs win again.
> 

Nobody cares about a RAM space they'd occupy - they're not intended
for everyday use. They are just for *critical* cases.

> > In any case, the ability to achieve a goal in more than one way is
> > great. And in a system administration it's vital.
> 
> Yes, but having other options doesn't mean you have to take them -
> they might be just worse.
> 

Well, from my very own experience of dealing with Linux, SCO, and
SunOS machines I learned that it is VERY good when you have 2
ways. Back then, SunOS (4.0) didn't have a decent rescue disk - only
an emergency boot. And you know, one day the Murphy's law becomes true
- one of ignorant idiots around decided to "save" some power by
turning the external SCSI tape drive off, which was NOT good, since
the thing was hanging on the same sontroller as the SCSI disc inside
and they both had the same power chain. The system lasted long enough
until the next massive swapping request and then died a horrible death
;-). And you know what got damaged? Right: the kernel binary and
libc.so* While I was perfectly able to boot using an emergency boot
disc, I couldn't run any single program because of the libraries.It
was not funny - we had to bring the damn thing to our commercial
provider to reinstall the system.

Anyway, apart from all blah-blah, I still think that having a
statically-linked copy of most critical programs IS important despite
the existence of rescue disks.

-- 
-Alexander

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


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