From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Aug 24 6:44:51 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from orchard.arlington.ma.us (orchard.epilogue.com [128.224.138.4]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 18BD415162 for ; Tue, 24 Aug 1999 06:44:47 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from sommerfeld@orchard.arlington.ma.us) Received: from orchard.arlington.ma.us (localhost [[UNIX: localhost]]) by orchard.arlington.ma.us (8.8.8/1.34) with ESMTP id NAA14008; Tue, 24 Aug 1999 13:42:27 GMT Message-Id: <199908241342.NAA14008@orchard.arlington.ma.us> To: Manuel Bouyer Cc: Wolfgang Solfrank , freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, tech-userlevel@netbsd.org, tech-kern@netbsd.org Subject: Re: Need some advice regarding portable user IDs In-Reply-To: Message from Manuel Bouyer of "Tue, 24 Aug 1999 15:06:52 +0200." <19990824150652.A4107@antioche.lip6.fr> Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 09:42:27 -0400 From: Bill Sommerfeld Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > Solving this is not trivial, I don't think changing the panic() to > return(appropriate_error_code) is the rigth thing to do, in some case > you want to panic if a filesystem gets corrupted. Indeed, from an overall system robustness perspective, a panic, reboot, and salvage is, in general, preferable to a forced-unmount of / or /usr leading to the system becoming useless.. This isn't necessarily going to be the case for other filesystems, but still, it would require manual intervention to recover from. This problem has been dealt with in various ways in other systems in the past. My understanding is that under some circumstances, Multics would automatically invoke an on-line incremental salvager when corruption was detected; however, this can also be dangerous -- several multics security holes (which were all eventually closed) involved tricking the directory salvager in various ways... one of these involved a quoting error in the script which invoked the salvager so that you could embed a ";" followed by a command in the name of the directory to be salvaged... - Bill To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message