AT&T 386 UNIX reboot

[Bill Kennedy]

An article I posted earlier asks if anyone knows how to make run levels
5 or 6 work with AT&T 386 UNIX.  On page 51 of the release notes there
is a write up on how to reboot from remote.  Since that was *exactly*
what I wanted to do, I tried it.

DON'T DO it!  If you do exactly what it says a number of bad things will
happen to you, not the least of which is that it won't reboot.  The
uadmin function by itself will not unmount file systems and umountall -k
won't kill processes that have file systems busy.  I don't care what the
book says.  The most severe consequence is that if you have a bootwait
entry in inittab and it can't get finished, you can't reboot at all.

In every case I tried a hard reset was required to reboot which defeats the
purpose of a remote reboot.  Further, the file systems that were left busy
(because umountall -k doesn't work) are not as healthy as fsck would have
you believe.  I was able to recover them by running fsck from the boot
floppy, but it made for a very long afternoon which culminated in having
to make a new kernel as well.
-- 
Bill Kennedy  usenet      {killer,att,rutgers,sun!daver,uunet!bigtex}!ssbn!bill
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