[geeks] Prolog for network configuration

[Joshua D Boyd]

http://www.research.microsoft.com/research/dtg/davidhov/pap.htm

Papers on the internals of Microsoft NT/2k are sometimes interesting.
Sure, Microsoft doesn't come up with many great ideas of their own,
but when they are steeling ideas, it is often from niche places that
wouldn't get exposed much if it weren't for MS.  Sucks for the niche
people, but is interesting for the rest of us.  

For instance in this one, they talk about embedding prolog in the
network setup system to use to right a reasoning system that ensures a
valid network setup at all times (which does explain some of the
trouble I've had).  It seems to me to be a little bit to strict (I
wish I could leave TCP/IP, and all the drivers that depend on it,
installed while I uninstall a hardware ethernet driver, then just
reconnect the TCP/IP stuff to the ethernet), but over all seems pretty
slick. 

I'll never forget another paper I read talking about proper malloc
usage in DLLs.  It perfectly explained why win95/98/me are so
unstable.  According to the paper, the address space between 2 and 3
gigs is completely unprotected.  So all shared memory gets put there,
including many DLLs.  So if something goes wrong with a dll, it can
take out everything else in the memory space, despite the fact that
win9x is supposed to have protector memory.

To further make that situation worse, DLLs need to use the same malloc
and free that the calling program does (which is not a simple thing to
pull off), or things are pretty much garanteed to go wrong.  

And of course, I've always liked that NT had a fairly fine grained ACL
system, for the FS at least.  I hear that is supposed to be available
for most free unixs now, but I haven't had a chance or reason to try
it at home since I'm the only user of the unix systems.  I intend to
reformat my old lintel file server to be a netbsd/samba server, and
when I do, I'll try to explore ACL options for netbsd then.

Now, what I really want to know was exactly how did things go wrong
with NT?  I mean, they brought in that great guy from DEC!  Did he
screw up on his part, or is it the stuff that is built on top of his
part that is the problem?  

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd