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

[Richard B. Gilbert]

On 3/17/2012 5:03 PM, Nomen Nescio wrote:
> glen herrmannsfeldt<gah at ugcs.caltech.edu>  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?
>
> I don't think excuses for bad design are going to help. The answer is to
> time out the request if the NFS server doesn't respond and then force an
> unmount, thereby freeing the client system. Where is the deadman switch in
> NFS? The only answer is rebooting the client or server, you get the same
> data loss so what's the practical benefit of your data loss analysis? Either
> the server has to come up or you lose data, *in their shitty design*.
>
> There should be a two phase commit to make sure the server throws away any
> data and the client doesn't consider it committed. IBM can do this stuff
> correctly, UNIX can't. UNIX and NFS are broken, this is just one of a
> million stupid UNIX non-designs.
>
>> Why would you expect that in the case of an NFS disk?
>>
>> As previously mentioned, the result is data loss.
>
> Two phase commit. Don't depend on clients and servers to always get along,
> plan for the times they don't. Don't lose data. Don't hang a client
> machine. It's all basic, obvious stuff for a serious OS. UNIX needs work,
> lots and lots of work.
>

Remember, Unix was written by students at Berkely.  They wrote it to 
meet *their needs*.  If your needs were not considered, feel free to fix 
it yourself; the sources are available.  Just about everyone did
just that!  Most, if not all, modern Unix Systems have some "Berkeley" 
in their ancestry!

The design of the user interface was influenced by the Model 33 
teletype.  I think most of the Model 33s are in museums or in a 
landfill.  Typing on those things was *work*!  You could bruise your 
fingers while typing on them.