[Simh] Simh Digest, Vol 40, Issue 7

[Bill Pechter]

On 3/9/07, simh-request at trailing-edge.com <simh-request at trailing-edge.com>
wrote:

>
> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 08 Mar 2007 11:32:04 -0700
> From: Kevin Handy <kth at srv.net>
> Subject: Re: [Simh] Simh Digest, Vol 40, Issue 6
> To: simh at trailing-edge.com
> Message-ID: <45F056A4.9040505 at srv.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Bill Pechter wrote:
> > One of the fun things is to boot either 2.11BSD or v7 Unix  on a PDP11
> > and show how small and primitive "real" Unix is...
> >
> > 'Course showing them an emulated VAX with VAX/VMS or 4.x BSD also works.
> > NetBSD Vax is also slick.
>
> Then, you can show them what happens when you
> "rm -rf /" as root, or its equivalent, followed by
> repairing it by copying over a backup hard disk image.


When I was teaching Unix Sysadmin for Pyramid Technologies we did just that
on their boxes in the lab.

The trick was having a pair of disk drives and dd-ing over the image from
drive1 to drive 0.

Great when the students screw up the OS installation lab and don't want to
fall further behind watching the ROFS (Read Only File System) tape see-saw
while loading and installing.

The seek time on a magtape aproaches forever -- especially on the 150meg
tape
carts.

My neat trick for Windows recovery at home is a sysprep'd image I can drop
back in place
here with all my apps and patches in place (at least it minimizes the
windows update time).

Bill



Follow with a discussion about having a toy system
> like this for software development and testing.
> The ability to test unsafe behavior, or doing some
> one-way operation, and then quickly restore yourself
> back to a known good state, is one of my favorite
> tricks.
>
> Sometimes it's the stupid things make the biggest
> impression.
>
>
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> End of Simh Digest, Vol 40, Issue 7
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