wnn@ornl.gov (Wolfgang N. Naegeli) (01/11/91)
In article <61981@bbn.BBN.COM> abm@alan.aux.apple.com (Alan Mimms) writes regarding MacX 1.1 announcement: > Sorry if you don't agree this should be here. To the contrary, I feel very strongly that this SHOULD appear here. comp.sys.mac.announce needs to have more messages or it won't be very useful. I should be able to look at it if I am very busy and don't have time to look at other conferences for a few days or after having been on vacation for a couple of weeks, and find all the important stuff referenced, so I do know whether I need to dig into any other groups. ----------------------------- I was shocked, when I recently discovered that my SUM restore diskette was empty. I had not looked at it for a long time, but whenever I had shut down my Mac IIci and inserted the diskette to have SUM update the Volume Restore Record, I saw and heard much hard disk and floppy disk activity, which made me believe that the records on both disks were being updated. After several unsuccessful trials, I called Symantec Technical Support, but they were not of much help. They suggested I reinstall SUM, but that did not help. I have now discovered the reason for the malfunction: I was using an 800k floppy disk, and this worked well initially. But my Volume Restore Record now contains some 880k, which naturally won't fit on the diskette. Any well-behaved Mac program tells me when I am trying to write to a disk that does not have enough free space to complete the operation, but not this one that purports to be my guardian angel! I think it is unforgivable that SUM neither tells me about the problem, nor prompts me for a second diskette, but simply proceeds to shut down the Mac, leaving me with a false sense of security. I called Symantec to report this. The technician who answered did not say they knew about this bug, but neither did he seem to be surprised. He said he would pass the report along to the programmers. I asked that they inform their SUM customers about this hazard, and he said he would pass this suggestion along too. I am not so confident that they will act on it, based on a similar problem with an earlier version that I reported, and which they ignored until they released the new version several months later. At any rate, no one called back in the last two days. Please alert the SUM users you know about this problem. ************************************************************** Wolfgang N. Naegeli President, MacClique--East Tennessee Macintosh Users Group Internet: wnn@ornl.gov Bitnet: wnn@ornlstc Phone: 615-574-6143 Fax: 615-574-6141 (MacFax) QuickMail (QM-QM): Wolfgang Naegeli @ 615-574-4510 Snail: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6206 ************************************************************** [Note from moderator pro tem: I had previously rejected what follows and suggested posting instead to c.s.m.misc or c.s.m.apps. The following comments were adressed to me in response: Also, I believe it should report on any confirmed discovery of a new Mac virus and on anything else that can lead to serious trouble or data loss. So after pondering your response to my posting a few days ago, I would like you to reconsider. You wrote: > For instance, an official > reply to your problem from Symantec would be appropriate for this > newsgroup. It does not seem that Symantec will do anything about this soon. I believe this is a dangerous situation and that users should be alerted. I don't think posting to any other newsgroup would be as effective. Here is a revised version: -------------------- I still maintain that one-time unverified bug reports or complaints about products do not belong here, but I'm nothing if not easy; just insist. :-) Anyhow, Werner will be back in six more days and can set the true policy. Followups are directed to comp.sys.mac.apps for the following text; discussions of policy on this newsgroup should be directed to c.s.m.misc. /JBL ]