Novell recently split the libc and clib patches for NetWare. For a long time patches like "nwlib6a" included both. Now, they're split.
This just caused me a problem. It turns out that if you have libcsp6b (the LibC patch) applied and not nwlib6k (the CLib patch), there is an abend possibility. It happened yesterday. It turns out that in that case, a badly formed network broadcast can cause an abend. This caused three of my six cluster nodes to fall on their butts at the same time. That was fun. Strange (but good) thing is, I had already applied both patches to these three servers but hadn't gotten around to rebooting them yet. So, by killing themselves they actually fixed the problem.
The abend, key details:
Heh heh heh. Oops.
And now a bit of history. Long time NetWare admins can ignore this part.
Q: Why are there two C libraries?
CLIB is the library NetWare started with. It began life in the dark and misty past, probably in the late 1980's. It is the deepest, darkest bowels of NetWare from the era when Novell was it when it came to office networking. Being so old, its APIs are very mature. Applications developed against CLIB generally speaking just plain work.
CLIB is also depreciated since it is highly proprietary, and doesn't play well with others. "Just plain works" in this instance means an assumption of 8.3 names, with kludging to support long file names if at all possible. CLIB applications have a tendency to have IPX dependencies for no good reason.
LIBC was created, IIRC, around the release of NetWare 5.0 when it became possible for NetWare to operate in a "pure IP" environment. LIBC was designed with the concept of POSIX semantics in mind, which CLIB was not. LIBC was created from scratch with long file name support. By now, as of NetWare 6.5 SP7, most of the NetWare kernel is written against LIBC rather than CLIB.
As an example of LIBC vs CLIB, take the 'MyWeb' service this blog is served by. When I did this the first time, it was on NetWare 6.0, using Apache 1.3. Apache 1.3 was linked against CLIB and was very stable. The service notes for the Apache Modules I needed to run to make it work made it clear that supporting long file-names on remote servers was something that only recently started working.
When the migration to NetWare 6.5 came around, it meant I had to migrate MyWeb to Apache 2.0. Apache 2.0 is linked against LIBC and used a different apache module to make things work. I had troubles. The LibC functions were not nearly as mature as their CLIB counterparts, and it showed. 3.5 years later things are now a lot more stable then back then.
This just caused me a problem. It turns out that if you have libcsp6b (the LibC patch) applied and not nwlib6k (the CLib patch), there is an abend possibility. It happened yesterday. It turns out that in that case, a badly formed network broadcast can cause an abend. This caused three of my six cluster nodes to fall on their butts at the same time. That was fun. Strange (but good) thing is, I had already applied both patches to these three servers but hadn't gotten around to rebooting them yet. So, by killing themselves they actually fixed the problem.
The abend, key details:
EIP in SERVER.NLM at code start +0015FD27hHeh heh heh. Oops.
And now a bit of history. Long time NetWare admins can ignore this part.
Q: Why are there two C libraries?
CLIB is the library NetWare started with. It began life in the dark and misty past, probably in the late 1980's. It is the deepest, darkest bowels of NetWare from the era when Novell was it when it came to office networking. Being so old, its APIs are very mature. Applications developed against CLIB generally speaking just plain work.
CLIB is also depreciated since it is highly proprietary, and doesn't play well with others. "Just plain works" in this instance means an assumption of 8.3 names, with kludging to support long file names if at all possible. CLIB applications have a tendency to have IPX dependencies for no good reason.
LIBC was created, IIRC, around the release of NetWare 5.0 when it became possible for NetWare to operate in a "pure IP" environment. LIBC was designed with the concept of POSIX semantics in mind, which CLIB was not. LIBC was created from scratch with long file name support. By now, as of NetWare 6.5 SP7, most of the NetWare kernel is written against LIBC rather than CLIB.
As an example of LIBC vs CLIB, take the 'MyWeb' service this blog is served by. When I did this the first time, it was on NetWare 6.0, using Apache 1.3. Apache 1.3 was linked against CLIB and was very stable. The service notes for the Apache Modules I needed to run to make it work made it clear that supporting long file-names on remote servers was something that only recently started working.
When the migration to NetWare 6.5 came around, it meant I had to migrate MyWeb to Apache 2.0. Apache 2.0 is linked against LIBC and used a different apache module to make things work. I had troubles. The LibC functions were not nearly as mature as their CLIB counterparts, and it showed. 3.5 years later things are now a lot more stable then back then.