Risky Data Ops

From Rixstep’s recent Xnews:

A while back ace IT security programming student Sean Collins discovered that NSWorkspace operations failed on operations with files in excess of 4 GB on remote Windows volumes. The suspicion is Windows had little to do with it. When Sean contacted us we wrote a special module he could use to test his theory. This module eliminated all other possible culprits and simply set up an autorelease pool and then invoked Apple's incarnation of NSWorkspace. Crash and burn. 32-bit systems can't handle more than 4 GB period: that's the limit of virtual addressing. If the rumours are true Apple can't copy files larger than 4 GB. If they are true. And if they are true we know why moves across volume boundaries can result in data loss: because a pinhead - and in this case an enormously pinheaded pinhead - decided that inasmuch as the file was already in memory - hey!

As a point of clarification, the bug I found was in FAT32 volumes. Somehow, even though none of the files were greater than the 4gb limit, if all the files in the operation put together exceeded 4gb, the operation would fail.

Quite troubling. Combine this, with the recent news stories about OS X’s less-than-stellar move operation (If the destination volume is disconnected both the original file as well as the copy get dropped on the floor) and you have quite a few people going “WTF?”

Even the Apple fans are realizing what is going on, but try to put on a smiling face for the camera.

RD: Leopard’s Time Machine Not Supporting Airport Disks is a Good Thing

This was explained on one of the developer lists a couple weeks back. The problem is that integrity cannot be guaranteed — the AirPort acknowledges receipt of the data before it’s actually written, and if power is interrupted, the disk disconnected, yadayadayada in the window between the Airport acknowledging receipt and the data actually getting written out to disk, it’s gone forever with no way to recover it or even realize it’s gone missing.

Well hey, doesn’t that sound awful familiar. I mean it was only a paragraph or two ago!

I have a few WTFs that I’ve been sitting on for a few months in PHP, I was going to bring them up but it’s so foggy right now I’ll have to look it over and retrace my steps. All I know is that it left me very unhappy with what it was returning to me in a program.