Follow-up on EVE's Boot.ini Issue

Krinsath writes "CCP, publishers of Eve Online, have posted a Dev Blog detailing the circumstances leading up to the deletion of XP's boot.ini file, which was earlier discussed on Slashdot. The blog post has intimate details about how the mistake occurred (a new installer from their normal one), how they responded and what CCP has learned from it. While fairly dry, it is to the company's credit that they're being open about one of the more serious bugs to crop up in gaming's recent history."

Comments

That's actually a really straightforward response.

[Silverlancer]

Now if only more businesses acted this way.

How is that even possible

[AndrewBuck]

From the article...

"Why doesn't Windows protect its system startup files? That's a good question, one that I have asked myself in these last few days and wish I knew the answer. But of course I'm not going to blame Microsoft for our mistake. Windows doesn't protect those files and therefore software developers must take care not to touch them. We should have been more careful."

That is a good question. I am not an EVE player myself so I don't know if this update had to be run with admin privileges but it doesn't appear to be that way from the question and reply. If you are not running as admin then how is it even possible to remove a system file that is necessary to boot the system. Unlike the EVE representative making this statement I am going to blame Microsoft, it should not be the developers responsibility to make sure they don't break the OS, it is the OS developers responsibility to make sure that it cannot be broken without admin/system/root access.

-Buck

Re:How is that even possible

[Osty]

That is a good question. I am not an EVE player myself so I don't know if this update had to be run with admin privileges but it doesn't appear to be that way from the question and reply. If you are not running as admin then how is it even possible to remove a system file that is necessary to boot the system. Unlike the EVE representative making this statement I am going to blame Microsoft, it should not be the developers responsibility to make sure they don't break the OS, it is the OS developers responsibility to make sure that it cannot be broken without admin/system/root access.

Two things to note:

1. This was an XP problem. Technically it could've happened on Vista, but I haven't seen anything that said it did. As such, this falls into the same category of problems that Microsoft attempted to fix in Vista with UAC -- nearly everybody ran XP as admin, and many apps expected you to be running as admin.
2. This was a problem with an installer/uninstaller. Since nearly everything on Windows installs into %programfiles% and that's a shared location, installers need admin access (installers that ask if you want to install for "Just this user" or "Everyone" are not going to install in %userprofile% if you choose "Just this user". They're just looking to see if the Start Menu shortcuts should go into "%appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu" or "%allusersprofile%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu"). Vista will elevate your privleges when you try to run an installer (you'll get a UAC prompt), after which a misbehaving installer could screw up boot.ini. Regardless of operating systems, you almost always install applications as administrator. Yes, you can install apps in $HOME on *nix systems, but 9 times out of 10 you'll use sudo on the installer (sudo apt-get install foo). Therefore this is technically a bug that could happen on any OS. It's not difficult to imagine an application install that deletes your kernel image, for example.

The real WTF here is that they have an important game file named "boot.ini". That's an exceedingly poor choice of filename. Think of it like having a game file called "autoexec.bat" or "vmlinuz" that actually has nothing to do with the DOS boot process or the Linux kernel. The only defense they give for that is "legacy".

Re:How is that even possible

[RulerOf]

Didn't Quake have an autoexec.bat file as a startup script? Quake 3, and I assume for 2 and 1, contained a file called "autoexec.cfg." I always thought it was aptly named, being a DOS veteran myself, because it contains game configs like default keybindings (e.g. bind w +move) and such that actually allow you to control the game in the first place, and it's always called during game startup. Very similar in function to the file that it is named after.