fair@dual.UUCP (Erik E. Fair) (01/04/84)
<FLAME ON, AFTERBURNERS FULL>
Tonight, thanks to two idiots, we lost an unknown amount of mail
and news. The first idiot is the one who filled up our /usr/spool
filesystem. The second idiot is the one who wrote uucp in such a fashion
that it can receive a file into a full filesystem, and NOT NOTICE IT!
IDIOT! IDIOT! (shouted at the top of my lungs).
<FLAME OFF, BUG REPORT ON>
UUCICO can and will receive and acknowledge receipt of files
all the while it is writing to a full filesystem (which has no effect,
other than to lose the incoming data). The catch is that since it
doesn't notice that everything is going down /dev/rathole, it will
acknowledge and the other end will duly destroy its copy of the data
that was transferred. I have not looked at the code yet, but I can
guess what I will find. Whomever wrote the stuff for shoving incoming
data into TM* files probably forgot to check for negative returns from
`write(2)' (`Gee, I didn't know write could fail...').
For those of you who know what it is, the old BerkNet handles this
error quite gracefully, with no loss of data. It may not be a fast network,
but it is as cheap as UUCP, MUCH more flexible, and MUCH more reliable.
In the three years that I have used the BerkNet software (first at Berkeley,
and now I maintain it at DUAL) I have NEVER lost a file. I can't say the
same for uucp. Eric Schmidt, where ever you are, take a bow.
<BUG REPORT OFF, REQUEST ON>
Anyone who sent mail to the `dual' system in the last two days
(arguably not many people, but the primary purpose of this is to report
the bug...) should resend.
<REQUEST OFF, IRRITATION LINGERS>
Erik E. Fair {ucbvax,amd70,zehntel,unisoft,onyx,its}!dual!fair
Dual Systems Corporation, Berkeley, California