We have a lot of NFS filesystems and, like most people today, we use NFSover TCP instead of over UDP. But this leads to a problem; sometimeswhen our systems reboot, they can't mount all of the NFS filesystems onthe first attempt. It generally takes several minutes to get to a statewhere all of them are mounted.

(We don't use the automounter, so we mount everything at boot; we have our own solution for the problemsthe automounter is trying to solve.

Here is a thought and a theory that has recently struck me.

One reason that writing secure programs is hard is because programmershave a kind of blindness about our own code. Instead of seeing the codeas it really is, we tend to see the code as we imagine it in our heads,and as a result we see what we wrote it to do, not what it actuallydoes.

(This is not usually a literal blindness, although we can do that too,but a disconnect between what the the

Someday you may be faced with a deprecation situation where you need to add a compatibilityswitch to your program. When in this situation it may be tempting toresort to controlling things with an environment variable, instead ofgiving your program yet another command line option.

(The problem with using command line options is that they add clutter,complexity, or both to your documentation, including any usage stuffthat the program prints.)

Unfortunately this is not a good way to add such switches to yourprogram, especially compatibility switches