hamish@waikato.ac.nz (03/26/91)
I would just like to express my disappointment in the person who coded the libraries for the Netware C interface that I have got. After carefully reading of the manula and much cursing and swearing in my office I discover that the problem with my program wasn't a bug of mine, gremlins on the ethernet or even a ghost. No. Some busybody had inserted code into the QueryServices routine that went through the reply packets and swapped all the values to lo-hi bytes ordering, including the 48-bit ethernet address which looked liked it was scrambled at random. All I can say is its a good thing they include the source to it, otherwise I might still be blaming little creatures running through the wires selectively destroying bits of information. This brings about a question. If it was done on purpose (and its pretty hard to write about 10 lines of code by accident) why isn't it documented, and why this call and not a few others as well, just for good measure :( All flames for this to /dev/null I think a bug of this magnitude deserves a flame, especially when it isn't covered in the readme on the disk! -- ============================================================================== | Hamish Marson <h.marson@waikato.ac.nz> | | Computer Support Person, Computer Science Department | | University of Waikato | |Disclaimer: Anything said in this message is the personal opinion of the | | finger hitting the keyboard & doesn't represent my employers | | opinion in any way. (ie we probably don't agree) | ==============================================================================
baird2@lincoln.ac.nz (03/26/91)
In article <1991Mar26.115305.3242@waikato.ac.nz>, hamish@waikato.ac.nz writes: > > I would just like to express my disappointment in the person who coded the > libraries for the Netware C interface that I have got. After carefully reading > of the manula and much cursing and swearing in my office I discover that the > problem with my program wasn't a bug of mine, gremlins on the ethernet or even > a ghost. No. Some busybody had inserted code into the QueryServices routine > that went through the reply packets and swapped all the values to lo-hi bytes > ordering, including the 48-bit ethernet address which looked liked it was > scrambled at random. > There are other examples of documentation/programming mismatches in the C Interface. The GetObjectDiskRestrictions procedure does not return 0x40000000 when no quota is set - as stated in the manual. It specifically checks for this value and if found sets it to zero! Overall, Novell have done a sloppy job on the C Interface. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- John Baird Internet: J.Baird@lincoln.ac.nz Senior Computer Consultant CompuServe: 75360,35 Centre for Computing & Biometrics Phone: (64) (3) 252-811 Lincoln University Fax: (64) (3) 252-944 Canterbury New Zealand
mallsop@sunc.mqcc.mq.oz.au (Mark Allsop) (03/27/91)
In article <1991Mar26.115305.3242@waikato.ac.nz> hamish@waikato.ac.nz writes:
-
-I would just like to express my disappointment in the person who coded the
-libraries for the Netware C interface that I have got. After carefully reading
-of the manula and much cursing and swearing in my office I discover that the
-problem with my program wasn't a bug of mine, gremlins on the ethernet or even
-a ghost. No. Some busybody had inserted code into the QueryServices routine
-that went through the reply packets and swapped all the values to lo-hi bytes
-ordering, including the 48-bit ethernet address which looked liked it was
-scrambled at random.
-
-All I can say is its a good thing they include the source to it, otherwise I
-might still be blaming little creatures running through the wires selectively
-destroying bits of information.
- This brings about a question. If it was done on purpose (and its pretty hard
-to write about 10 lines of code by accident) why isn't it documented, and why
-this call and not a few others as well, just for good measure :(
Actually there are several problems with the C interface, and the Netware
interface directly. I have written a few utilities and am used to finding
things that are wrongly documented. For example, the example program for the
GetConnectionsUsingFile leaves out a parameter given only a page before. The
Queue services describe a structure wrongly, and there are a few other subtle
little differences sure to agrivate programmers.
It seems to me the doco was rushed and not properly checked for problems.
In any case, the doco is in many cases not the most informative of documents!
Now in the interests of not just plain being negative, is there someone out
there from Novell who wants to know about these? And of importance to us as
users, is there a central place that problems can be collected and distributed
so we don't spend ages looking for our problem when it dosn't really exist?
+Mark.
--
Mark Allsop Computer Scientist
email: mallsop@suna.mqcc.mq.oz.au The Statistical Laboratory
Phone: At MacUni: (61 2) 805-8792 / \ Macquarie University, Australia
Fax : : (61 2) 805-7433 | This one goes up to 11.....