Saturn comes back around…

For certain evil purposes last week, I assembled the old Saturn with a hard disk I found when cleaning a little while ago (I have that kind of tech stuff – you clean up and find 40GB disks – I’m pretty sure I have an 8.4 bumming around somewhere too).

Saturn comes back around

I ended up being able to do the evil I needed to, but I could tell that the room was a bit warmer due to the extra box being alive. I was also lazy and couldn’t be bothered going downstairs for the D200, so this was shot with my old and trusty Coolpix 4500.

I used the box to be able to get remote access to a customers’ test setup to do some diagnosis on a bug (that’s notoriously hard to reproduce). I think I have a fair idea of what it is now though (timing related – not fun).

Remember kids, threads are evil.

Also, an interesting thing to note is that there is, in fact, a limit to not the number of fds you can pass to the select(2) system call, but to the actual number (on my Ubuntu box here, passing a fd of, say 2000 is probably going to lead to trouble). This has nothing to do with the previously mentioned bug, but an interesting point.

3 thoughts on “Saturn comes back around…

  1. FD_SETSIZE in #include defines the size with a default 1024.

    On BSDs you can change it before defining FD_SETSIZE before including any other header, on linux don’t have this option if I read the headers correctly.

    Anyway, there is poll(2)

  2. of course, not every system has poll(2) – just to make it more fun. Up until MacOS X 10.2 IIRC there wasn’t a properly working poll(2) around.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.