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Old 9th May 2008
J65nko J65nko is offline
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Default Marc Ballmer, an OpenBSD developer squashes 25 year old BSD bug

See http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=artic...anded&count=15 and http://www.vnode.ch/fixing_seekdir
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Old 10th May 2008
DrJ DrJ is offline
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Amazing. I am reminded again about how complex software has become. And 4.2BSD is (was?) comparatively simple.
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Old 10th May 2008
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You should look at AT&T UNIX Version 6 code...
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Old 11th May 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DrJ View Post
Amazing. I am reminded again about how complex software has become. And 4.2BSD is (was?) comparatively simple.
Well, that's like saying that heart surgery is comparatively simple compared to brain surgery...

Anyway ... Great story!
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Old 11th May 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker View Post
Well, that's like saying that heart surgery is comparatively simple compared to brain surgery...
Yes but... Remember in those days X11 was not really used (everything was on a serial terminal using termcap running at 9600 baud), the primary graphics tubes were the Tek 4014 and relatives, most printers were simple line printers, and lasers had not yet caught on, and virtual memory was just starting to be used (in Unix, at least). Input from cards was just fading.

I'm not saying the OS internals were trivial, just much simpler than they are now.
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Old 12th May 2008
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The worst thing about this - after reading an article on it via slashdot - is that the Samba people had been using a work-around for this for years, and nobody thought to tell a BSD developer so that the (in the end, very simple) error could be fixed!!!

The moral is, then, to file your bug reports! (And then keep up with and reply to the mailing list threads! (guilty! ))
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Old 12th May 2008
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That's not true.

From the comments section on the Undeadly page:
Quote:
> > So let me get this straight, the Samba developers have been aware of this problem for a while and just patched over it ?
>
> Samba people knew about incorrect behavior for the past three years, but never bothered to find its causation nor notify BSD people to take a look at it.

This is not true. The knew about the problem _and_ they talked to BSD people. But apparently they were told they were using the API wrong, it was never meant that way, etc., etc.,...

[...]

This was used as an "excuse" to not further investigate. But ffs uses a linear directory stucture, and it even was the original filesystem seekdir(3) and friends were implemented on, so it was a jump to conclusions that was not justified.

Actually, once Marc had a test program that could reproduce the problem and while discussing things on icb, we both saw the bug almost simultaneously. The fix was quite straightforward, the challenge here was finding out what was going on.
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Old 12th May 2008
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OK, then that's the blame put in the right quarter then. (Ours.)

Still, the moral stands! If you are working around an error, report it, and try to get it fixed. A short, compilable program or script that clearly demonstrates the error helps immeasurably.
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Old 14th May 2008
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has this bug being solved because i guess i am experimenting the same problem. should i update the system and/or samba?
thank you.

all the best,
v
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Old 14th May 2008
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Yes, it has been fixed in OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD ... I don't know about other BSD flavours...
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