One of the little hassles with hardware that can be managed over thenetwork is the bootstrapping problem: it has to somehow get an IPaddress so that you can manage it and give it the right IP address. Overthe years, vendors have come up with any number of solutions to this,such as the ever-popular 'give it an initial static IP address and it'sup to you to arrange a host that can talk to it'.

Recently we ran into a piece of hardware that has the

Here's a philosophical question: what do Unix errno values mean?

One possible meaning is that they are hints about why your systemcall failed. Another possible meaning is that they specify what wentwrong; in the extreme, a system call can only fail for certain specificreasons, each of which is associated with a specific errno value.

Errno as a hint is essentially the traditional Unix view. V7 Unix didn'teven document specific error returns for system calls, and Bell Labstook it to the logical

Once, long ago, I did a distributed computing project course where Itried to speed up a drawing program by moving its expensive floatingpoint calculations (I believe it needed to calculate square roots forsomething) to a machine with a much faster CPU and floating point. Weused Sun's RPC/XDR for this because it was both a great match for whatwe were doing and the obvious choice at the time, among other reasons.

Rather to our surprise the drawing program just didn't get much faster