Subject: Re: /rescue, crunchgen'ed?
To: tld <tld@tld.digitalcurse.com>
From: Lennart Augustsson <lennart@augustsson.net>
List: current-users
Date: 08/30/2002 13:58:54
tld wrote:

> Something I wondered and now I'm going to ask:
>
> If, as it seems, for some perople the fact that a crunchgen'd binary 
> is less safe because it can be damaged by bad sectors, and you really 
> don't know if it has until it is time to use that.
>
> What I suggest is a script executed (say) weekly like `cat 
> /rescue/the_big_file >/dev/null 2> /dev/null || echo "It has bad 
> sectors!"`

That doesn't really help.  I had a disk crash recently that consisted of 
a few scattered
sectors on the disk suddenly being unreadable.  Before this point in 
time everything
was fine, but suddenly... BOOM.  And after that, you had to be very 
careful which
executables you tried to run.  A crunchgened /rescue would probably have 
meant
that I was hosed at that point.  But if you have an old machine you 
probably have
a floppy to boot from at that point.

    -- Lennart