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From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.de>
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Subject: Re: A simple way to crash your system.
In-Reply-To: <8867.848975625@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at "Nov 25, 96 06:33:45 pm"
To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard)
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 1996 09:39:45 +0100 (MET)
Cc: hackers@freebsd.org (FreeBSD Hackers)
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Jordan K. Hubbard writes:
>> I use it all the time, but I'm *very* careful not to run more than one
>> process on the FS, and I unmount the darn thing as soon as I read/write
>> the files to the FS.
>>
>> It works as long as I treat it like fragile china, and not having it
>> would be a real setback for me.
>
> I understand this, but you also have to realize that many people don't
> understand the fragile china approach (and with justification - how
> *would* one generally know?) and it's a real setback to have your UFS
> filesystems blown away too. :-)
>
> I'd welcome some compromise solutions, otherwise I think it's simply
> too dangerous to advertise, explicitly or implicitly, as a feature.

I don't use it, so it's no skin off my back, but from what I see on
-questions, a lot of people there do.  I'd suggest one of:

- do nothing.
- remove it and announce the fact on -announce.
- make it read-only (will this help?)
- announce the dangers on -announce, and leave it to the user to
  decide.

I haven't heard of too many problems in the use of dosfs, in fact.
I'd guess that people don't exactly treat it like fragile china, but
since they tend to come from the DOS world, they don't run more than
one process on it at a time anyway.

Comments?

Greg