Marc Santhoff wrote:
Good /God/ man, is that all? I opened this expecting to find that a
member of the community was in real trouble (frankly, the sort of thing
I was almost in over the last week).
It's enough. Costs me hour of frustrating work recreating anything,
doing nothing fruitful. Moreover I'm sitting on a time bomb, because I
really do not know, what other files may have been damaged. Last time
this happened I had some failures in other software that was detected
weeks(!) after the incident.
I'm currently using an elderly Toughbook, because something else in my
workroom took the power out sufficiently viciously that the lights
flickered 300m away and I've been too busy to go around everything with
a PAT tester to find the culprit. And that's been the least of the
problems over the last few days... curiously, some of them have been
caused by my strident insistence that colleagues should exploit our
central servers (which have RAID etc.) rather than relying on the aging
hardware and OSes under their desks.
So, what know? Taken seriously I have to restore the complete system and
data from backup.
Seems I deserved some trouble because I'm not running development tools
on a dedicated machine or inside a virtual environment...
What OS are you running, and how much privilege had you given yourself?
FreeBSD 9, simple user having sudo privilges but nothing run as root or
by sudo. The session was the same as ever - besides Lazarus.
Frankly, I think the suggestion that Lazarus /might/ have caused a
system crash is more serious than the discovery that a system crash
probably corrupted files.
You're right. That's why I told the story as introduction.
What I asked for is help locating and understanding Lazarus' file
handling. Some standard errors like unneccessarily holding files open
when not in use can be avoided easily.
Yes, that's a good point although there's also issues about whether the
underlying OS, computer and attached peripherals really are syncing data
as reliably as expected. The bottom line- of which I was reminded
regularly during my unhappy time running OS/2- is that an OS will
attempt to preserve the integrity of its filesystems but makes no
guarantee about individual files, and that there's no way of determining
that a file's been sacrificed. It's interesting to speculate on whether
something like Lazarus could benefit from storing projects onto a
transaction-aware database server rather than as individual files.
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
--
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