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There've been a couple of threads recently about safety-critical code (Rules for, and in real-time Java). Safety-critical code necessarily includes careful handling of failure situations. Or does it? Here's another take on failure handling, from the opposite direction:

Enhancing Server Availability and Security Through Failure-Oblivious Computing (Rinard et al., 2004) was originally presented at OSDI '04, but hasn't previously been featured here:

We present a new technique, failure-oblivious computing, that enables servers to execute through memory errors without memory corruption. Our safe compiler for C inserts checks that dynamically detect invalid memory accesses. Instead of terminating or throwing an exception, the generated code simply discards invalid writes and manufactures values to return for invalid reads, enabling the server to continue its normal execution path.

We have applied failure-oblivious computing to a set of widely-used servers from the Linux-based open-source computing environment. Our results show that our techniques 1) make these servers invulnerable to known security attacks that exploit memory errors, and 2) enable the servers to continue to operate successfully to service legitimate requests and satisfy the needs of their users even after attacks trigger their memory errors.

The paper includes descriptions of how this technique was applied with good results to servers such as Apache and Sendmail, as well as to client programs such as Pine, Mutt, and Midnight Commander.

The paper also raises concerns about the potential for such techniques to create a bystander effect (although the term moral hazard might be more appropriate here), influencing programmers to be less careful about error handling because they have a safety net.

This work was performed on programs written in C, and there's a temptation to think that the approach is only applicable to memory-unsafe languages. However, there's a connection here to the approach used by some of the classic shell scripting languages and their descendants such as Perl, in which certain kinds of failure are silently tolerated in the interests of keeping the program running. The approach could also have potential applications in other memory-safe languages, providing the potential for higher-availability programs, as noted in the paper's conclusion.

While most language implementors aren't going to rush to incorporate failure-oblivious approaches in their languages, the positive results obtained from this work are thought-provoking, and could inspire other less traditional but effective ways of handling failure.

Legacy ISA

I found a professed "competent" student at the local university who spent a couple of hours destroying the setup in one of the machines. We now have one machine working..

That's a snippet from email I got yesterday. The owner of the machines is a local doctor, and the procedure has been that the backup tape from the "working" server has been restored to the "spare" server, thus providing safety in the event of failure. Good idea, but the weak part was that they used Travan tape drives. These failed, and a local consultant decided to replace them with DDS4 DAT drives. Excellent idea, but he knew nothing about Unix, so he went looking for help. He's the one who sent the email.

• Greg Payne spotted a sign on the highway in Norwalk, Connecticut: “Superman Returns Toys.” He asked himself, “Why, was he dissatisfied with them?”

• Amazon.co.uk’s review of the Steve Coogan movie Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story included this, to the surprise of Paul Hassett: “Nor is the versatile filmmaker a stranger to the post-modern romp, like 24 Hour Party People. In that peon to Manchester’s music scene, Steve Coogan was Factory honcho Tony Wilson.”

• “I always knew that moving up in a corporation was hard work,” Reg Brehaut e-mailed, “but now it has been documented: an editorial in Computerworld (Vol 22, No. 12) refers to their current Salary Survey results, in which ‘Every wrung of the corporate ladder is represented.’”

• Susan Gable found a comment in the Mashpee Enterprise, a newspaper based on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, that may arouse an image you’d prefer to avoid at the breakfast table: “Coyotes will gladly go for food left in unsecured garbage cans and household pets.”

• Our old friend the misplaced modifier has turned up again, this time in the Netscape News Anchor Commentary last Monday about that building that collapsed in Manhattan: “There was one person inside the building at the time of the explosion, a doctor of Emergency Medicine. After spending about 90 minutes trapped in the rubble, firefighters pulled the doctor to safety.” You’ve got to admire those firefighters; even being buried doesn’t stop ‘em.

• And finally, a couple of headlines that might be errors or could be quiet jokes by bored sub-editors. Michael Keating found this one on the normally extremely sober news@nature.com site: “Bruno the bear: released to the Italian Alps, meets grizzly end in Germany.” And a headline from last Monday’s Guardian: “Rare flower found on site is a plant, says developer.” [A word of explanation is perhaps needed here: a California developer claims a rare protected plant called the Sebastopol meadowfoam found on a site he is about to develop was transplanted there by opponents in order to stop him. The dispute has become known as Foamgate.]