Re: rc and smf

[Bill Hacker <wbh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dan Melomedman wrote:

> You don't see the point. It takes a long time to fix the fault. BSD has
> nothing to do with this. The real world does. You don't want a nuclear
> reactor to explode because it took an admin five minutes to notice the
> fault, and restart the service.

It could be considered rash to presume to lecture the former Deputy 
Battle Staff Commander, New York NORAD Air Defense Sector, on managing 
nukes safely.  I never lost a one.

Stop there, or go and google the warshot yields of GENIE, Nike-Hercules 
(improved) and BOMARC.

> Another example: a telecom can't afford to lose service in some of the
> systems even for mere seconds. They lose thousands of dollars.

And note that after military service, the same individual pursued a 
telecoms IS/IT career from Northrop-Page (1968) thru Cable & Wireless 
(until 1994) - and still does  - Conducive Group (Asia) Limited (1994 to 
date).

> This is
> exactly why Erlang, the language originally designed with telecom
> requirements in mind has supervision in its feature set! When you make a
> call in the UK, it runs through an Ericsson switch running Erlang that
> supervises its processes, and restarts them if they fail.

Horsepuckey.  Tell it to the Royal Marines.

I was responsible for the V.36 (not V.35) routing and billing interface 
software to an AXE-10 International gateway switch in London that was 
odd-man-out in UK's largely 'anything-BUT Ericcson' environment. GSM, 
some, fixed-line and international, NOT.

A Senior Ericsson exec once apologized 'on behalf of all hundred 
thousand Ericsson employees' for that particularly unfortunate POS.

Erlang is largely concept, and near-as-dammit uniquely Ericsson.

What are you doing now?  Googling for off-the-wall trivia to throw out 
here so as to delay developers?

> Again,
> supervision may be new to some people on this list, but it isn't anything
> new or detrimental.

Google AN/FSQ-7 and AN/GSA-51 and their fallback modes while you are 
thinking 'new to...'

Doubt you were born yet.

When you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, good advice is 'stop 
digging'.


Bill