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

[David Froble]

Richard B. Gilbert wrote:
> 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!

Just like people  :-)