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

[Richard B. Gilbert]

On 3/16/2012 9:26 PM, glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
> 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

As a programmer, among other things, I make it a point to check
for success or failure when that information is returned. It's not just 
fclose( )!  Failure to check status when status is returned can produce 
some amazing, but useless, results.

I've even gone so far as to add error checking to other people's
code. It's sometimes easier than explaining why the system returned
"impossible" results.

NEVER FORGET!  The computer did what you TOLD it to do.  That's not
necessarily the same as what you wanted it to do!