Kirk watched the image of /usr/planet dwindle in the viewer, and turned
off his backup copy of the Error Logger.
"Captain, special Kernel mode AST from Star Fleet command."
"On main viewer."
The image of a high ranking officer from the Star Trek pool (paged)
appeared on the screen.
"Captain Kirk and the crew of the ENTERP:: A few cycles ago, a terrorist
group called the Popular Organization for the Suppression of Individual
eXpression (POSIX) broke into the Historical Preservation star cluster,
and carried out an act of wanton sabotage. They managed to effectively
delete the server's System Dump file."
"But what is the point ..."
"Don't interrupt me, I'm running at IPL 2. This system has the only existing
copy of VMS 4.7. Under that version, dump files are not marked as permanently
open by the file system. You realize the implications ?"
"Yes, if the file is deleted, its blocks will be returned to the free pool."
"Precisely, and from there they will be allocated to new files. If the
system goes down later, it will write to all those blocks, hosing any
files which have been unlucky enough to allocate them. Your mission,
Jim, whether you decide to accept it or not, is to locate those blocks
and allocate them before that system goes down. That is all."
The screen went blank. Kirk stepped back to his seat.
"Checksum, plot a course for the Historical Preservation cluster. Mr
Scott, allocate SCHED spinlock and set IPL to Warp Factor 8.
Mr Spock, lock our code into memory, I don't want any exceptions, no
matter whose fault it is." He waved his hand in the traditional gesture
of a VAXfleet captain indicating the ship was to move or change course.
W H Y C O P S H A T E Y O U <<<<&l <
-if you have to ask get out of the way-
Have you ever been stopped by a traffic cop and, while he was
writing a ticket or giving you a warning, you got the feeling that
he would just love to yank you out of the car, right through the
window, and smash your face into the front fender?...
