eoshaugh@nmsu.edu (Erik Oshaughnessy) (02/24/91)
I've discovered yet another defect/flaw/whatever in the NeXT operating system, and I thought that some of you might be interested in hearing about it. (BTW, software: NeXT OS 2.0, hardware flavor: 030 Cube ) I was getting ready to write an automatic random signature generator, and I'd made my .signature a named pipe for the generator to write to. I got sidetracked by something, and ended up trying to send some mail and trying to include my .signature without remembering that it wasn't what it used to be ( whoops ). As soon as the machine tried to read from the empty named pipe, a friendly System Panic window popped up, scrolled through a bunch of friendly warnings and errors and promptly died. Hoping that it was merely my WindowManager in the weeds, I attempted to remotely login to the machine. No dice. Ping reported that the machine was alive, but it refused to let me login. Sooo.. I restarted the machine, and tried it again to confirm that reading the empty named pipe was the cause of the crash. Sure enough, it died again. There you have it... Reading empty named pipes ( created with /etc/mknod .signature p ) will kill a NeXT. Seems like something less than robust behaviour to me. Perhaps one of you lucky people that has a NeXT rep on campus could pass this info along to them in hopes that this problem can be verified and corrected. Cheers! _____________________________________________________________________________ ~ | Erik O'Shaughnessy |\/\/\/| ~ | Small Systems | | ~ | New Mexico State University | * | ~ ()========= | Las Cruces, NM USA | (x)(x) L_l===== | eoshaugh@dante.nmsu.edu C _) ==== |------------------------------------ | ,___| ==== |"Do not follow the NULL pointer, | / | for that path leads to chaos, /____\ Die Bart! Die! | and madness." - me | \ | -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
burdick@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (Bill Burdick) (02/25/91)
>> Reading empty named pipes ( created with /etc/mknod .signature p )
I didn't see the 'p' option documneted in the man pages. Perhaps this
is because it is unsupported.
-- Bill
burdick@mentor.cc.purdue.edu