Perry E. Metzger (perry@piermont.com) wrote:

: Syslogd uses ttymsg from wall to send out its messages to
: terminals. This routine forks off a copy of the process and has it
: wait around trying for a specified time if it can't immediately write
: to the tty.
: 
: Our present syslogd specifies a timeout of 1 second on the lifetime of
: such processes, which is pretty low.
: 
: The 4.4lite2 syslogd has a lifetime in it of five minutes, which is
: pretty high.
: 
: These are rather different numbers (!) and I was wondering if anyone
: had an opinion on which is more appropriate.

Make it short.

If you want to shutdown and have lot of time, you do lots of warnings.
At least one of them should make its way to each tty even in 1 second. 

If you want to shutdown FAST, you don't really care if 100% of ppl. get
that one warning you would issue at most. After all, they could be
fetching a coffee for 5 minutes and not see it. If you want to shutdown
fast and notify ppl. beforehand, you have to go to their terminal room.
Thats my experience as system administrator (SunOS 4.1.x, most of them.
And I find the lockd/statd timeouts VERY annoying long. Half of the
time, I Stop-A the offending machines and reboot it by hand, if its one
of the diskless ones).

Wishing you a happy new year,

	Ignatios Souvatzis