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From: bzs@BOSTONU.CSNET (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: mod.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: nasty little 4.2 bug ??
Message-ID: <8511102224.AA18773@ucbvax.berkeley.edu>
Date: Sun, 10-Nov-85 17:03:29 EST
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Posted: Sun Nov 10 17:03:29 1985
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>From: "J. Noel Chiappa" 
>
>	Larry Allen found this several years ago and reported it to
>Berkeley. Perhaps they have (or should have) set up a mailing list for
>4.2 bug reports that people with 4.2 systems can get on, so that everyone
>wouldn't have to rediscover things like this?
>		Noel

There are in fact a few ways to keep up with bugs on 4.2 systems. All 4.2
tapes came with the program 'sendbug' which posts bugs to Berkeley. In
addition it is generally reasonable practice to also post such bugs/fixes
to unix-wizards*. Anyone responsible for 4.2 administration should be reading
unix-wizards for bug reports/fixes. Further, Mt. Xinu has provided a service
where either they will support your 4.2 system or provide you with bugreports.

I am surprised after "several years" people still aren't aware of these
things.

Of course, bugs and fixes still slip through the cracks as they will on any
system, and they will get re-discovered, I doubt there is any fix for that
ultimately (if you think vendor supported O/S's are better, think again.)

Perhaps what is really needed here is some tracking of Internet implementations
by some more global organization (such as the NIC) as many of these bugs
only exhibit themselves when heterogeneous environments are tried (that is,
beyond a list of implementations.) One also cannot help but note that almost
all internet implementations (with perhaps the exception of SUN) are barely
supported (or not at all, eg: vms) by the vendors of the hardware on which
the software runs, and the third party vendors are often too small to really
do the job well.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University

* USENET also has a separate address for this, net.bugs.4bsd, tho not nearly
as used as unix-wizards.