Slashdot Mirror
A Diagnosis of Self-Healing Systems
gManZboy writes "We've been hearing about self-healing systems for a while, but (as is usual), so far it's more hype than reality. Well it looks like Mike Shapiro (from Sun's Solaris Kernel group) has been doing a little actual work in this direction. His prognosis is that there's a long way to go before we get fully self-healing systems. In this article he talks a little bit about what he's done, points out some alternative approaches to his own, as well as what's left to do."
TiVo has had self-healing Linux systems out there for five years now. There are virtually no complaints of TiVo software failure (hard drives certainly go bad from time to time, but very rarely does the OS get itself into a state it can't fix), so the notion that self-healing systems are still years off is silly. They may not be extremely advanced yet, but they're certainly out there.
While a self healing system sounds nifty, todays systems aren't even good enough to be healed manually.
Uninstalling applications is often not handled by the OS and has to be done by application itself, resulting in incomplete installations, config files and registiry entries that havn't been properly cleaned up and whatever.
Files arn't versioned, so every change done to a file will simply erase the former content forever, not so good if the former content might have been important.
Undelete? Nope, we don't have that either, we have this hack of a Trashcan, but that won't help you much if some programm deleted the file.
Check of integritiy of an installed piece of software isn't possible either, sure there are third-party solutions, but again that should be something that the OS provides at default
Well, there are millons of more issues why todays system suck and why it is often easier to simply reinstall from scratch then to try to actually fix the mess, and yep, that is true for both Linux, Windows and MacOS, sure for some more then for the others, but thats it.