Hi, all!
I've read recently published link to byte article and got an idea....
Was there a magazine related to UNIX systems in 70s-80s?
I had so much fun reading that Byte issue, even ads (especially ads!)
It is so fun...
Phil Garcia wrote:
I've always wondered about something
else, though: Were the original Unix authors annoyed when they learned that
some irascible young upstart named Richard Stallman was determined to make
a free Unix clone? Was he a gadfly, or just some kook you decided to
ignore? The fathers of Unix have been strangely silent on this topic for
many years. Maybe nobody's ever asked?
Gnu was always taken as a compliment. And of course the Unix clone
was pie in the sky until Linus came along. I wonder about the power
relationship underlying "GNU/Linux", as rms modestly styles it.
There are certain differences in taste between Unix and Gnu, vide
emacs and texinfo. (I grit my teeth every time a man page tells me,
"The full documentation for ___ is maintained as a Texinfo file.")
But all disagreement is swept away before the fact that the old
familiar environment is everywhere, from Cray to Apple, with rms
a very important contributor.
Doug
Does anyone have that running on anything? If so, I'd like a copy of the
lint libraries, probably /usr/lib/ll* or something like that.
It's not well known but I spent a pile of time creating lint libraries for
pure BSD, System V, etc, so you could lint your code against a target and
know if you let some non-standard stuff creep in.
I suppose I could fire up a Sun3 emulator like this and find them:
http://www.abiyo.net/retrocomputing/installingsunos411tosun3emulatedintme08…
If someone has a SunOS 4.1.1 box on the net and can give me a login (non-root)
that would be appreciated.
Thanks,
--lm
I noted just as I sent my previous posting with two references to
fuzz-test papers that the abstract of the second mentions two earlier
ones.
I've just tracked them down, and added them to various bibliographies.
Here are short references to them:
Fuzz Revisited: A Re-examination of the Reliability of UNIX
Utilities and Services
ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/pub/techreports/1995/TR1268.pdf
An Empirical Study of the Robustness of MacOS Applications
Using Random Testing
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1228291.1228308
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> Ken and Dennis and the other guys behind
> the earliest UNIX code were smart guys and good programmers,
> but they were far from perfect; and back in those days we
> were all a lot sloppier.
The observation that exploits may be able to parlay
mundane bugs into security holes was not a commonplace
back then--even in the Unix room. So input buffers were
often made "bigger than ever will be needed" and left
that way on the understanding that crashes are tolerable
on outlandish data. In an idle moment one day, Dennis fed
a huge line of input to most everything in /bin. To the
surprise of nobody, including Dennis, lots of programs
crashed. We WERE surprised a few years later, when a journal
published this fact as a research result. Does anybody
remember who published that deep new insight and/or where?
Doug
> From: norman(a)oclsc.org (Norman Wilson)
> SP&E published a paper by Don Knuth discussing all the many bugs found
> in TeX, including some statistical analysis.
> From: John Cowan <cowan(a)mercury.ccil.org>
> "The Errors of TeX" was an excellent article.
Thanks for the pointer; it sounds like a great paper, but alas the only
copies I could fine online were behind paywalls.
> From: Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com>
> btw. there is a v6 version of fsck floating around.
Yes, we had it at MIT.
> I'm wonder if I can find a readable copy.
As I've mentioned, I have this goal of putting the MIT Unix (the kernel was
basically PWB1, with a host of new applications) sources online.
I have recently discovered (in my basement!) two sets of full dump tapes
(1/2" magtape) of what I think are the whole filesystem, so if I can find a
way to get them read, we'll have the V6 fsck - and much more besides (such
as a TCP/IP for V6). So I think you may soon get your wish!
Noel
> From: "Ron Natalie" <ron(a)ronnatalie.com>
> The variable in question was a global static, 'ino' (the current inode
> number),
> Static is a much overloaded word in C, it's just a global variable.
Sorry; I was using 'static' in the general CS sense, not C-specific!
> in the version 7 version of icheck .. they appear to have fixed it.
Actually, they seem to have got all three bugs I saw (including the one I
hadn't actually experienced yet, which would cause a segmentation violation).
> From: Tim Newsham <tim.newsham(a)gmail.com>
> There are bugs to be found .. Here are some more (security related, as
> thats my inclination):
> ...
> http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/unix-jun72/2008-May/000126.html
Fascinating mailing list! Thanks for the pointer.
Noel
A. P. Garcia <a.phillip.garcia(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Were the original Unix authors annoyed when they learned that
> some irascible young upstart named Richard Stallman was determined to make
> a free Unix clone?
A deeper, more profound question would be: how did these original Unix
authors feel about their employer owning the rights to their creation?
Did they feel any guilt at all for having had to sign over all rights
in exchange for their paychecks?
Did Dennis and/or Ken personally wish their creation were free to the
world, public domain, or were they personally in agreement with the
licensing policies of their employer? I argue that this question is
far more important than how they felt about RMS (if they cared at all).
Ronald Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
> [RMS] If you read his earlier manifesto rants he hated UNIX =
> with a passion.
> Holding out the TOPS operating systems as the be-all and end-all of user =
> interface.
I wish more people would point out this aspect of RMS and GNU. While
I wholeheartedly agree with Richard on the general philosophy of free
software, i.e., the *ethics* part and the Four Freedoms, when it comes
to GNU as a specific OS, in technical terms, I've always disliked
everything about it. I love UNIX, and as Ron pointed it out like few
people do, GNU was fundamentally born out of hatred for the thing I
love.
SF
So it turns out the 'dcheck' distributed with V6 has two (well, three, but
the third one was only a potential problem for me) bugs it.
The first was a fence-post error on a table clearing operation; it could
cause the entry for the last inode of the disk in the constructed table of
directory entry counts to start with a non-zero count when a second disk was
scanned. However, it was only triggered in very specific circumstances:
- A larger disk was listed before a smaller one (either in the command line,
or compiled in)
- The inode on the larger disk corresponding to the last inode on the smaller
one was in use
I can understand how they never ran across this one.
The other one, however, which was an un-initalized variable, should have
bitten them anytime they had more than one disk listed! It caused the
constructed table of directory entry counts to be partially or wholly
(depending on the size of the two disks) blank in all disks after the first
one, causing numerous (bogus) error reports.
(It was also amusing to find an un-used procedure in the source; it looks
like dcheck was written starting with the code for 'icheck' - which explains
the second bug; since the logic in icheck is subtly different, that variable
_is_ set properly in icheck.)
How this bug never bit them I cannot understand - unless they saw it, and
couldn't be bothered to find and fix it!
To me, it's completely amazing to find such a serious bug in such a critical
piece of widely-distributd code! A lesson for archaeologists...
Anyway, a fixed version is here:
http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/tech/unix/ucmd/dcheck.c
if anyone cares/needs it.
Noel
