On Wed, Jan 05, 2000 at 02:00:46PM +0100, Thomas Michael Wanka wrote:
> That makes me remember the OS/2 people when Win95 came out 
> and they said You would need a special "Bomb Programm" to crash 
> OS/2 where Win95 would crash by itself. 
> 
> To be serious, you wouldn´t do 1.) to a machine on real life. I have 
> no reset switch on my machines anyway. As for 2.), I run some 

A power shutdown will have the same effect, and this *happens* in real life,
even with UPSes (the high school I mentioned do have UPSes, this didn't
prevent the power shutdown either). This is a test case meant to reliably
reproduce cases which can happen (this test shows that fsync() doesn't work
properly on linux, which certainly hurts more things than sendmail).

> systems on SuSE Linux (I use mostly SCSI hardware too) and there 
> are no problems reading defective CD media. 

I've seen the same behavior with bad blocks on IDE disks: the kernel
would start looping trying to read the bad block and would become totally
unresponsive. I think whenever this happens with IDE CD drives depend on
the driver you use. I think if you use SCSI emulation you don't have this
problem because the proper sense is immediatly returned. If this is true
this would prove that a linux system needs more tweaks than a NetBSD one :)

> SuSE linux has more than 1.550 programs, most of them (all I tried 
> out) work out of the box, on the other hand it is a little clumsy to 
> install software not prepared for SuSE.

I must admit I only tried redhat and derivatives (kickstart is soo nice :)

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
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