Xref: utzoo comp.sys.att:6896 unix-pc.general:3224
Path: utzoo!attcan!telly!eci386!jmm
From: jmm@eci386.uucp (John Macdonald)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.att,unix-pc.general
Subject: 3b1 startup: I CAN'T BELIEVE at&t was really this stupid!
Summary: maybe it was convergent
Keywords: destructive cleanup
Message-ID: <1989Jul5.151150.25280@eci386.uucp>
Date: 5 Jul 89 15:11:50 GMT
Reply-To: jmm@eci386.UUCP (John Macdonald)
Organization: R. H. Lathwell Associates: Elegant Communications, Inc.
Lines: 23

On the 3b1, /etc/rc runs /etc/.cleanup every time the system is brought
up.  There are two things in here that are wrong.

1. /etc/wtmp is cleaned out!  This means that if the system goes down
unexpectedly, it throws away some of the most useful information
available for determining why it went down.  This should be cleaned
out in a more predictable and clean way - e.g. in /etc/cleanup.wk
it could be moved to /etc/wtmp.old, thus you always have one weeks
worth of history.

2. There is a find procedure to clean out the lost+found directory.
(This may be commented out by default, it certainly is here.)  The
problem here is twofold - people don't check lost+found very often
so this could lead to an important file being thrown away before it
is missed - even worse, it is set up to discard any directory that
hasn't been modified in 7 days but when fsck puts something into
lost+found it keeps its original timestamp, so this means it doesn't
get to stay in lost+found for even a week, it could get removed
during the same reboot in which fsck put it into lost+found.
-- 
"Software and cathedrals are much the same -          | John Macdonald
first we build them, then we pray" (Sam Redwine)      |   jmm@eci386