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Date:      Tue, 17 Aug 1999 14:57:25 -0700
From:      "Boune, Damian" <DBoune@co.napa.ca.us>
To:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   RE: bug wich crashes freebsd 3.2 (HA!)
Message-ID:  <CA46FF404177D111A6B600609737B2B8017359FD@209-78-56-68.co.napa.ca.us>

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Our friend makes a good point. What Reinoud did is only "improper use" if
the operating system does not provide some kind of catch in the case that
someone does this. 

You can assume he came from the Microsoft world. In that horrid world, it is
known that the USER is not supposed to be able to cause such a crash, though
we all know better. In the unix world we assume that you are familiar with
how unix does things and will pay attention to such details. Who would have
thought, coming from the microsoft world, that one would have to "unmount"
(whatever THAT is) a disk!

It would have been possible for the designers of any particular flavor of
unix to implement something that would prevent this. However actually doing
it is another thing. We have a base "format" in which we "mount" media in
general that has been around for a long time. If we change that, we risk
incompatibility, and we also make our kernel quite a bit larger as we would
have to have more than one base function (rather, set of 's) for making
media available to the user. Anyway, it just isn't something anybody wants
to waste time on, as we know how it works currently, and if you follow the
directions, which happen to be posted all over the place, you won't get into
too much trouble. 

Some os's actually "mount" and "unmount" some media, each time an action is
taken upon it. This creates a high amount of overhead that us unix buffs
don't want, but it does prevent the user from crashing the system.

Under unix it is also assumed that the "user" will not be mounting and
unmounting media, but that an experienced "Administrator" would be doing it.
Well, the face of unix has changed, and now the pocket hacks are all running
it. Most of us take on the challenge knowing we will have to learn how to
play by the *nix rules.

So to those who do not like it, please write some code to send to our good
friends at the FreeBSD project that will fix this little annoyance :)

(had to put my "2 cents" in.)

-d

> -----Original Message-----
> From: William Melanson [mailto:wjm@gate.net]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 17, 1999 1:41 PM
> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
> Subject: Re: bug wich crashes freebsd 3.2 (HA!)
> 
> 
> On Tue, 17 Aug 1999, Reinoud Koornstra wrote:
> 
> % 
> % No i didnt umount the disk first.
> % But i didnt umount it on purpose to see.
> % And what if a user forgets to umount it before removing?
> % A whole os cant just hang by a user mistake now can it?
> % Bye,
> % 
> 
> If you use the os improperly of course it can! Please tell me this 
> is some type of practical (let's kill the os) joke. Where is that  
> FreeBSD for Dummies book when ya need it?
> 
> 
> 
> 
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