At 1:43 PM -0700 9/30/98, Dr. Bill Studenmund wrote:
>Actually the question should have been is it tye ttyflags line, or the
>line before?
>
>We had a problem recently where the fsck on the line before the ttyflags
>would cause the system to hang AFTER the "ttyflags" message was printed.

As the person who created that story I have to say it wasn't quite *that* bad.

I had fsck's of four partitions and the machine would hang if they started
in the wrong order.  The log would show three of the four fsck's as started
(or maybe it was done) and nothing else.  I didn't count all the way to
four and thought the problem must be with the immediately following item:
the ttyflag setting.

Partly I jumped to that conclusion because there had been some bugs in the
ttyflag code that caused hangs, but Dr Bill says that was fixed well before
1.3.2.  Now he's a little sensitive on the subject because I hammered him
for so long before I had to admit I mis-diagnosed the problem.

If anyone is still reading let me say that the solution I finally settled
on is a little different from the one I posted here.  Instead of disabling
boot-fsck of one partition I changed the sequence number to 1 (normally 2)
in /etc/fstab.  That way it does do the fsck on boot, but it does several
disks sequentially instead of in parallel.

Signature failed Preliminary Design Review.
Feasibility of a new signature is currently being evaluated.
h.b.hotz@jpl.nasa.gov, or hbhotz@oxy.edu