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

[glen herrmannsfeldt]

Fritz Wuehler <fritz at spamexpire-201203.rodent.frell.theremailer.net> 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 ..........................

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

If you don't like it, use a soft mount, otherwise that is considered
correct. 

If you are writing to a disk, and the disk doesn't respond fast enough,
you don't normally expect the system to just throw away the data you
thought you wrote, do you? 

Why would you expect that in the case of an NFS disk?

As previously mentioned, the result is data loss.

Which reminds me, also, of how many C programmers don't check
the return values from I/O function calls, especially fclose().

As fclose() has to flush the buffers, there is a good chance that
problems writing will result in fclose() returning an error code,
and if you ignore it you won't know that the data wasn't written.

-- glen