At Fri, 21 Dec 2001 18:58:30 +0000 (UTC), "Todd Vierling" wrote:
> : And I can't count on my hands and feet the number of times that busy
> : (millions of hits/day) Linux systems under my care have died because
> : something went bad and puked all over either libc, or libc and the dynamic
> : linker, making the entire thing useless until someone arrived on-scene
> : with a boot-disk.
> 
> And how is this situation different from something puking on NetBSD's
> /sbin/init binary...?
> 
> The argument about the shared libraries being "the" point of failure doesn't
> hold up.  On NetBSD, if *any* of the following are missing, you can't boot
> to single-user with the standard boot disk and do anything useful.

Not quite sure what you mean by "with the standard boot disk."  I'm
assuming you mean 'boot floppy,' since once they're installed NetBSD
disks ... often diverge from what is 'standard'. And why you'd try to
boot from a broken boot floppy is beyond me, so I think that's moot...


> * /sbin/init
> * /dev/console
> * /dev/{yourdiskdevices} and /sbin/mount_mfs simultaneously

Actually, the init-launching code will try /sbin/init, /sbin/oinit,
and /sbin/init.bak.

And, there are other ways to get around the disk device thing.  I seem
to recall that you can bootstrap yourself to writable file systems w/
kernfs (if you have it in your kernel).  Or, you could create some
kind of file system (not necessarily ffs, since the binary is the same
as mount_mfs still, right? 8-) on your swap partition, temporarily.
And there's NFS.


/dev/console is a single point of failure, and that's really kinda
lame, actually.



chris