Safely shutting down OS9 computers

[Richard....@googlemail.com]

Hello

Please could people with experience of OS/9 tell me the usual way to
park the hard drive / dismount the system and prepare it for shutdown?

e.g. on linux I can type

sudo shutdown -h now

Is there an OS/9 equivalent of that command? I've got a 4MB 68000
based OS/9 system from about 1992, that runs a Bruker spectrometer. I
suspect the current practice (e.g. flipping the power switch off at
the end of the day) might shorten the life of the equipment.

Thanks in advance,

Richard

[Martin Gregorie]

On Sat, 29 Nov 2008 10:17:47 -0800, Richard.E.George wrote:

> Please could people with experience of OS/9 tell me the usual way to
> park the hard drive / dismount the system and prepare it for shutdown?
>
> e.g. on linux I can type
>
> sudo shutdown -h now
>

There is no equivalent for OS-9.

You just make certain that no programs write to files have been shut down
and then hit the OFF switch. It's unwise to turn an OS-9 system off while
an application program is writing to a file because the file(s) it is
outputting will certainly be incomplete and may not be recoverable.

> Is there an OS/9 equivalent of that command? I've got a 4MB 68000 based
> OS/9 system from about 1992, that runs a Bruker spectrometer. I suspect
> the current practice (e.g. flipping the power switch off at the end of
> the day) might shorten the life of the equipment.
>

At a guess you will be using OS-9/68000 v2.3 or 2.4. These have no system
programs that hold files open for writing since there are no system
loggers or spoolers.

The filing system is very robust but slow since, unlike UNIX, there is no
disk caching to speak of and the file manager writes data back to disk at
the earliest opportunity.

I've used my system to compile results for competitions. This required it
to be set up in a van and run off a small petrol generator. Yes, I've had
the generator run out of fuel and stop a few times while the scoring
programs were in full cry and updating a set of indexed, random access
database files. This suite accepted terminal input while periodically
scanning the data, collating and printing results. No data was lost and
no files were corrupted in something like a month's operation spread over
several years.

HTH

--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |

[Martin Gregorie]

On Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:56:05 +0000, Martin Gregorie wrote:

Gobbledegook! I meant to write:

> You just make certain that <<all>> programs <<that>> write to files

> have been shut down and then hit the OFF switch.