Network OS's

[Jonathan Hutchins, Rune Webmaster]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Coleman" <mkc at mathdogs.com>

> 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.

Early burners did tend to hang if they had positioning errors or some other
hardware-based problems; and since the burning process tends to occupy
almost all of the PC's resources, that often results in a hard hang when
there's a problem.  It's actually worse with NT, because of some of the
"resiliance" features - if the OS can't get a tick in to close the program,
your only option is to hard boot.

Newer, faster burners and slightly evolved code has mostly eliminated
problems like that.  And I haven't had a chance to test it yet, but from
what I've heard most Linux systems are extremely robust in burning CD's, and
it doesn't seem to monopolise the system quite as badly.

> (..I didn't treat that machine delicately--if I needed to run MSVC and
Netscape
> at the same time, I did.  :-)

There does seem to be a high correlation between running Netscape and
crashing...

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

It is amazing how many patches and upgrades there have been for IIS.
'Course, there are the jokes about "Apache server" really being "A Patchy
Server" too...  IIS is some pretty awful code, and even if you think you've
set it up right it can pull  wierd, rotten stuff on you.  (It shouldn't be
confused with the base NT OS though.)  A web server is a system that I would
much rather see running a Unix-like OS than NT for many reasons.  By the
time you learn all the Microsoft specific tricks and techniques for getting
IIS right, you could have learned Apache and done a mail server too!

> 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.

Doesn't even take malice and forethought - just another driver with a
complimentary bug!

Seems there was a thread on Linux drivers recently, and on the superiority
of the Open Source Method in keeping 'em clean and compatible.  Drivers in
general seem to be improving though, I think it's a matter of people being
able to accurately determine that a driver is causing problems, and being
unwilling to tolerate bad code.