Something I've been mulling over lately is the the effects of A rulefor Internet software on specifications and how strongyou make requirements in them.

To put it one way: a 'MUST' in a specification makes a handy club tobeat people with, but perhaps they are best reserved for things thatare absolutely required in order to make the protocol work, becausein practice that is what is going to happen anyways.

(Note that a MUST often does not make an effective club, because ifit doesn

Here is an unpleasant discovery that we just finished making: in atleast Solaris 10 U6, ZFS changes the device numbers of all of yourfilesystems when your system reboots . More specifically (and evenworse), the device numbers of a pool's filesystems change wheneverthe pool is imported, including the implicit import that happenswhen a system boots up.

(This raises interesting questions of how NFS filehandles keepworking across system reboots, which they do. Presumably theyhave some other stable identifier for a given