Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!pacbell!indetech!fiver!palowoda
From: palowoda@fiver.UUCP (Bob Palowoda)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Use UNIX for MSDOS development?
Message-ID: <245@fiver.UUCP>
Date: 4 Sep 89 18:58:36 GMT
References: <1649@mtunb.ATT.COM>
Organization: Fiver Communications  Fremont, Ca
Lines: 58

From article <1649@mtunb.ATT.COM>, by dmt@mtunb.ATT.COM (Dave Tutelman):
> In article <4009@internal.Apple.COM> desnoyer@apple.com (Peter Desnoyers) writes:
[some stuff deleted]
>>+ the concept of developing on a machine that can crash in the middle of 
>>running a make - or worse yet, while you are editing - is abhorrent. 
> 	My experience is that my UNIX environment crashes significantly
> 	more often than my DOS environment.  Most (but not all) the time
> 	its the access line rather than the UNIX system itself, but the
> 	deffect on my work is the same.  I'd rather do my stuff from a
> 	single machine that's right there.  And if I'm doing a make from
> 	the server, the partial products of the make don't get lost.

  Wait a second here. I my experience it's DOS that crashes more 
often. In fact that's on of the main reason why I started to work under
unix because I got sick and tired of locking up a dos machine which 
brought down the whole machine. If the majority of the time is locking
up the file server under a lan don't you think the lan software  
protection should be improved to prevent this? One may ask are you
writeing software that locks up the line.  In anycase I have locked
up the line while debugging some dos software under unix. Big deal
I just kill the processes off and log back in and figure out what
went wrong to cause it to crash. I didn't loose anything when it 
happened, nor did it affect other users that where doing something
else on the system. 

>>+ and, finally, you're not trying to run some horribly buggy piece of 
>>software on the machine that your latest, not-quite-backed-up-yet copy of 
>>the source is resident on. After all, rest assured that in MS-DOS your 
>>disk controller is just another unprotected address for your stray 
>>pointers to search for.
> 	True enough, but access to the file server is much less chancy.
> 	Things have to be sane enough to be run the file access protocol
> 	correctly, in order to screw up the source accidentally.

  Once again it appears that your showing a problem in the lan software
protection. While I would not disagree that dos software writes to 
address that it shouldn't, a unix lan should offer some protection
against it. But in all fairness it's much better than say something
like Novell which dos software can bring down the whole system. I've
seen that happen too many times. Alot of these buggy pointers as
you point out are produced by the compiliers under dos. One must 
wonder if it's a virus or some software that bashed the harddisk.
Running under ATT's Simul-Task does have it's advantages here. When
a certain piece of buggie dos software if it trys to write out of 
it's address it produces a segmentation fault which at least can 
be recovered from. 

 I'd like to hear of cases where a dos program totally locked up
the unix system, what instructions that caused it? And if there
is anyway to detect it before it happens.

---Bob

-- 
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