[ale] Need an iso to wipe hard drives.

[Thompson Freeman]

On 04/22/2010 05:05:50 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 had a stray memory strike here - and it could be  
completely wrong.

As I remember it, the reason for sync three times was to  
ensure sufficient time for the sync to occur before issuing  
the shutdown/umount. After all, it takes time even for a  
speed typist to type 12 characters. Gives that slow  
hardware a chance to catch up!

As usual, YMMV, and I could easily be full of it.