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

[Bob Eager]

On Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:43:26 +0100, Fritz Wuehler wrote:

> 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
> ..........................

So, that's a Linux problem.

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

UNIX is not an operating system. It's a specification, and that 
specification doesn't include NFS anyway. Sweeping generalisations don't 
help. Some systems conforming to 'UNIX' work OK in this situation, and 
some don't.

>> 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.

On *your* system.

>>  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.

On *your* system.

>> 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.

If you can define UNIX land to be all systems conforming to teh spec. You 
can't.

>> 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".

Interesting that VMS bashing is not allowed, but UNIX bashing is (by some 
people's rules, anyway). Free speech?

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

You have...lots of UNIX-spec systems out there.

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