Network OS's

[Mike Coleman]

"Jonathan Hutchins, Rune Webmaster" <hutchins at therune.com> writes:
> > (All of the NT systems I've ever observed have crashed several times per
> > month, but perhaps my situation is unusual.)
> 
> Man, I'm really sorry to hear that.  I've had that level of problem only
> with bad hardware.  What kind of applications are you running on them?

One box I used for development in a Microsoft shop I worked for a couple of
years ago.  It had a CDROM burner attached to it and use of that device did
seem to correlate somewhat with the machine crashing.  (I should say also that
I didn't treat that machine delicately--if I needed to run MSVC and Netscape
at the same time, I did.  :-)

Another box was running IIS, I think, and would get periodically strung up for
reasons unknown.  Those are the two that come to mind.

I did have a chance recently to look at some code for a production NT device
driver (one not written by Microsoft) and it was kind of scary.  It's not fair
to generalize from one data point, but it did leave me with the thought that
probably most NT drivers have some subtle, latent flaw that would enable a
sufficiently expert cracker to crash or crack the system.  (This could be true
of Linux as well, but I think the differing mindsets and motivations help
here.)

--Mike

-- 
Mike Coleman, mkc at mathdogs.com
  http://www.mathdogs.com -- problem solving, expert software development