norton utilities - questions about internals

[Paul Guthrie]

I've been using Norton Utilites for about a month now.  Most of
the utilities seem to work well, and the screen display is great.
Someone should write a direct memory mapped version of "curses"
sometime.... it is obvious how much memory mapping of the screen
helps NU.  However, there is one caveat.  Do not run Norton Unerase
on a partition with news on it, even if the news files (ie any
file with the name as simply a number) are immediately purged.
A few mornings in a row I saw the system hanging on entry to
vi or some other things.  Even a simple 'rm file' would hang.
Anyways, I did a 'ps -ale' and looked up the wait channel in
a sorted by value nm of the kernel.  Sure enough, things
were hanging on a Norton added kernel variable (I forget
the name right now).  So I turned off the unerase feature on
the partition news is on and things have been fine ever since.  So
the moral of the story is that Norton is potentially buggy under
high unerase usage, especially where you have the potential of
running out of inodes.
--paul
-- 
Paul Guthrie
chinet!nsacray!paul or pdg at balr.com or attmail!balr!pdg