Fast reboot & Disk fragmentation

[DoN Nichols]

In article <1991Apr23.140925.10180 at spool.cs.wisc.edu> pb at pipe.cs.wisc.edu (PB Schechter) writes:

	[ ... ]

>First, I seem to remember that someone made a simple modification
>(somewhere) so that when shutting the system down normally, a key word
>is written to a key file, so that, upon subsequent rebooting, fsck need
>not be run (greatly speeding up the reboot process).  Rather than

	The information you want is at osu-cis under the name 'fsokay'.  I
forget whether it has a .cpio.Z on the end, but I think that it has.  (I'm
away from my machine, so I can't check it out by poping up another window,
and I'm stuck using 1200 baud, so poking around the archives on my system
from within the editor is not fun.  Osu-cis is also known as
'cheops.cis.ohio-state.edu' on Internet.

	[ ... ]


>Second, my disk is getting to the 60-70% full range, and things are
>starting to slow down.  Are there any suggestions for defragmentation?
>I know that I can copy everything to tape, delete it from my disk, and
>copy it back.  However, I'm looking for something easier, if it exists.
>(I seem to remember reports of a "defragmentation program" that someone
>has run, for example.)

	There is such a program, though I haven't run it yet.  (It must be
run while booted from a floppy, or disaster strikes.)

	If you do the back up to tape (Which is a GOOD IDEA anyway), be
warned that the backup utilities under ua WILL NOT back up any file that IT
THINKS came with the foundation set (so if you have replaced a program with
an improved version, same name, same directory - IT WILL NOT BE BACKED
UP!!)  Also, any files which carry a datestamp older than the time the
foundation set was installed on your system (THE MOST RECENT TIME), will
also not be backed up.  Files from a tar or cpio image from another system,
or from a previous install of this one should have their dates modified by
touch(1).  I just do:

	find / -type file -print | xargs touch

to make sure that everything that isn't excluded by the foundation set list
gets backed up.  (I think that it just totally skips anything in /bin and
maybe others.)  It also explicitly avoids the /etc/passwd and /etc/group
files.  You should make a separate cpio backup of the contents of /etc,
restore it in another directory, and mv the necessary files back to /etc.
Some of the files if reloaded from the backup can leave the system in a
strange state, so don't blindly mv everything from the backup into /etc.
(You might be able to get away with it if you do it while booted from a
floppy, so it doesn't touch the actual working files the kernel is currently
using.)

	Good Luck
		DoN.

-- 
Donald Nichols (DoN.)		| Voice (Days):	(703) 664-1585
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