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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!swrinde!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!nntp.ucsb.edu!usenet From: Axel Boldt <boldt@math.ucsb.edu> Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.unix.bsd.misc Subject: Re: Measuring "stability" (was: Linux vs BSD) Date: 08 Feb 1997 14:44:05 -0800 Organization: Univ of California at Santa Barbara, Dept of Mathematics Lines: 35 Sender: boldt@fermat Message-ID: <ywtn2te3olm.fsf@math.ucsb.edu> References: <32DFFEAB.7704@usa.net> <slrn5fejrn.353.bet@onyx.interactive.net> <5d7spf$8n6@web.nmti.com> <5d9p55$t1h@news.ox.ac.uk> <5dadfr$cnu@web.nmti.com> <ywtu3nq7oyq.fsf_-_@math.ucsb.edu> <32F93870.167EB0E7@freebsd.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: fermat.math.ucsb.edu X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.3/Emacs 19.34 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.misc:156883 comp.os.linux.advocacy:82844 comp.unix.bsd.misc:2373 I think crashme is a good start for testing stability, the only problem being that it does not test the networking code and the filesystems. Does a similar tool exist that rapidly sends garbage to random ports? Should be trivial to write in any case. We could then have a stability test that works something like this: - two crashmes running in parallel - repeatedly tar and untar a big directory (dir should not be writeable by the user running crashme) - one outside random network attacker - one httpd constantly being queried for a big doc (again, not writeable by crashme user). Clearly, we would have to specify which versions to test (I vote for the "stable" releases: Linux 2.0.x and FreeBSD 2.1, soon 2.2), which distributions (void in the case of FreeBSD, for Linux I would recommend Debian), and which network services to run (ftp,email,http,telnet,ping?) Since all of this depends heavily on hardware and network speed, the only thing that would make sense is to run the test twice on the same machine, switching OS's in between. Also, the test would have to be repeated several times because of the randomness involved. What do people think? Axel -- Axel Boldt * boldt@math.ucsb.edu * http://www.math.ucsb.edu/%7Eboldt/