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Swallowing signals :) Back in college, all of the computer science lab machines used shared NFS home directories. It wasn't unusual to see "NFS server not res

Swallowing signals :) Back in college, all of the computer science lab machines used shared NFS home directories. It wasn't unusual to see "NFS server not responding" on your console when the network was experiencing a hiccough. There was a running joke about how crafty students would swallow SEGFAULT in their assignments and just endlessly print out "NFS server not responding" in a delay loop. "Crash? No, it's just the network. Look!"

nupark2 15y ago
[edit] I just realized that he was debugging a third-party application. The narrative is a bit hard to follow. I can't quite figure out why someone so smart was doing something so stupid. The way to solve crashes is not to crash, unless you're erlang and functional and build the software to recover fully -- but that's not something remotely feasible to do for an application written in a standard imperative language. Otherwise trying to continue on blindly results in a hang like the one he experienced at best, and a data corruption at worst.