🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <900919072...@lilac.berkeley.edu>, DLV@CUNYVMS1.BITNET writes:
> >       Talking about how-to-turn-off-machine I forgot to say
> >       that BESM has a software feature to block power turnoff
> >       (I think it's a quite valuable idea, especially for Unix
> >       machines; what's about self-turning-on machines? ;-).
> 
> i have seen such a unix machine---the off switch just started a software
> routine that does synch and then turns off the power via software.

Yup, the NeXT does this. You actually can initiate a power
off request by pushing the button, but it goes to
software, wich pops up a window and asks you "Are you
Sure? Unsaved changes will be lost." etc. It then runs
shutdown, and power cycles the machine.

Now if I only had time, I'd figure out how to bypass this
and get straight off.  :-)

> 
> we have a very old sun at gc (a unix), and once we accidentally turned it
> off while it was working, and it was a real pain to restart it. :( luckily,
> it wasn't my machine. :)

Actually, you;d have corrupted the file system, but fdsk
(the file system maintenace utility) is pretty smart and
the file system design has enough redundancy that you can
recover from this kind of failure if you don't panic. The
only real no-no is to ignore corrupted file system
messages and keep working. After that, you're on your own.


			- peterd