[Info-vax] Current VMS engineering quality, was: Re: What's VMS up to these

[Fritz Wuehler]

Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:

> 2. Unix distributed networks using ethernet and shared disks is not 
> robust at all. You must be totally uninformed if you claim this. Have 
> you ever used a machine with an NFS root? Any time the server stopped, 
> rebooted, or whatever, all clients *freeze*. Not even rebooting, unless 
> you press the power switch. You just sit there waiting for the NFS 
> server to wake up again.

Correct. This just happened to me (facepalm) today on a modern Linux system
2.6.29.something kernel. I didn't think and took my NFS box offline and when
my Linux client couldn't get to the mounted share ..........................

Solution: reboot NFS box. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Can't the UNIX idiots
*ever* do anything correctly?

> 4. Unix does normally not crash, but instead freeze. And not only if the 
> network goes down, but also if the single machine serving the disk goes 
> down.

Exactly what happened.

>  Also, if anything in the server configuration changes, all clients 
> needs to be rebooted, no matter if the server comes back, since NFS 
> don't allow any recovery in that case. And we are talking about very 
> ungraceful rebooting here. No controlled take down. You'll have to reach 
> for the reset or power switch, since controlled shutdown is impossible.

I think this has improved somewhat and ZFS does serve NFS nicely and solve
many problems, but not The Big One.

> Oh, and by the way, these issues are not only relevant to machines 
> having an NFS root. The same is true for any use of NFS. It's just that 
> since the quoting reach back to "one common system disk", it boils down 
> to the NFS root in Unix land.

Correct.

> Go back to playing with Windows, and stop posting to this newsgroup, 
> since you obviously have little to contribute anyway. And VMS and DEC 
> bashing in general is not classified as "contributing".

Dammit! I need some VMS hardware...I hate UNIX and I have no freedom of
choice...


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