On Thursday, June 28, 2001, at 07:23  pm, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 28, 2001 at 07:02:18PM +0100, Matthew Theobalds wrote:
>> I had always thought that "reboot" and "poweroff" are the correct ones
>> for BSD whilst "shutdown" had been put in to maintain sideways
>> compatibility with those coming from a GNU background.
>
> Actually, shutdown first showed up (according to *our* man pages, of
> course) in 4.0BSD. halt and reboot (hadn't ever heard of poweroff;
> it seems to have been added in NetBSD 1.5... makes me wonder what
> was wrong with shutdown -hp, but whatever) stem from System 6 UNIX.
>
> The important distinction is that shutdown notifies users of their
> impending doom and does the appropriate rc.shutdown stuff. halt,
> reboot, whatever just sends SIGTERM to everything, waits to see if
> anything lives through it, sends that SIGKILL, then kicks the
> machine's power.
>
> I find this comment, from shutdown(8), the best explanation of why
> both methods still exist today:
>
>      shutdown provides an automated shutdown procedure for super-users 
> to
>      nicely notify users when the system is shutting down, saving them 
> from
>      system administrators, hackers, and gurus, who would otherwise not 
> bother
>      with such niceties.
>
> I'm assuming "them" references users there, though I guess it's a
> bit unclear. ;^>
>
> None of this changes the fact that these should never, ever cause
> any kind of panic.

Thanks very much for the interesting reading on the history of these 
tools.

>> Certainly, no problem at all. It occurred to me that I perhaps ought to
>> do so, however I wasn't sure whether or not this counted as a bug, but
>> now I know.
>
> Just the fact that you can't list the line of code at fault doesn't
> preclude the filing of a bug-report.
>
> It's actually plausible that this is a hardware problem, but it's
> still the kind of thing that ought to be looked at.
>
> Which brings me to my next point: any chance this is a hardware
> problem? Does it happen when other OSes try to reboot the machine?

The only operating systems it has had on whilst in my possession are Mac 
OS 7.5, Network Access Disk (don't recall what version of Mac OS that 
one is), and various incarnations of NetBSD 1.5. The only systems to 
cause this problem has been NetBSD 1.5 June 24 and June 16 sources. June 
24 was GENERIC kernel, June 16 was the GENERICSBC kernel.

It's therefore unlikely that it could be a hardware problem, though not 
impossible. It's got fairly standard components, Apple IIcx, 8MB RAM. 
Internal SCSI Hard Disk. Nubus Ethernet card, standard Display card.

I really can't think of anything which is exceptionally strange about it.

>> before I went away. It has just occurred to me that it is likely that
>> the "/dev/MAKEDEV" script installs relative to one's path. I should 
>> have
>> cd-ed in first, evidently.
>>
>> Panic's over, folks! My own stupidity.
>
> Heh. I even considered suggesting that that's what had happened. :^>

No doubt you thought:

	"He couldn't have missed something -that- obvious, could he..? 
Could he?!"

:P

All the best.

Matthew