[ale] Need an iso to wipe hard drives.

[lists at serioustechnology.com (Geoffrey)]

JK wrote:
> On 4/22/2010 3:05 PM, Chris Fowler wrote:
>> On Wed, 2010-04-21 at 21:16 -0600, JK wrote:
>>> I learned that too, on my first day as a Unix (SunOS 4) admin in grad
>>> school. "sync ; sync ; sync ; shutdown -h now".
>> Same on SCO.
>>
>> Why?  Did shutdown not flush all buffers and umount the file system?
>> Maybe we were just being paranoid?
> 
> 
> I think we were.  Surely Kernighan et al were smart enough to
> get the semantics of shutdown() right from the very start.
> Or else there's some subtle reason shutdown() can't sync,
> in which case pre-shutdown syncs would really be necessary.

I assure you, the original UNIX handled disk syncing properly prior to 
shutdown.  At one time, we looked into this SVR3 at the time and we had 
the source.

> 
> -- JK
> 
> 


-- 
Until later, Geoffrey

"I predict future happiness for America if they can prevent
the government from wasting the labors of the people under
the pretense of taking care of them."
- Thomas Jefferson