*BSD News Article 26082


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc
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From: hgs@allegra.att.com (Henning G. Schulzrinne)
Subject: Power outage mangles /etc
Message-ID: <1994Jan13.222516.11328@allegra.att.com>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ
Date: Thu, 13 Jan 1994 22:25:16 GMT
Lines: 11

Last night, we had a brief power outage. All the 250-odd Suns and SGIs
in this part of the lab came back up, with no dire consequences. My
eight NCR PCs running NetBSD 0.9 all had random stuff (apparently from
some include files) written over the /etc/ directory and who knows
where else, forcing a reinstall of the operating system. fsck
complained, but couldn't fix anything. While the NCR PCs were on a
surge suppressor, most workstations are not. Is this expected behavior
(i.e., are commercial derivatives of BSD like SunOS just plain more
robust), is it the PC hardware or just a very bad day?

Henning Schulzrinne