On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 04:13:36PM -0500, Gary Thorpe wrote:
> What is the system supposed to do if you remove the storage without
> unmounting it? Just discard all buffered data (including metadata) and
> return an error for future requests? I agree that it should panic in
> this case, but really the user is asking for trouble if they do this.

20 years ago, there was a computer called Amiga.  If you ejected a
writable removable media (a 3.5" disk, most often :) and there was
buffered data in RAM, the system would pop up a window telling the
user to insert the disk again so the buffers could be flushed.

I know this kind of behaviour is no good for a headless server, but I
kind of miss it on desktop/laptop machines where I am the only person
using the system and am staring the display some 15-16 hours a day.

  -jm