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Proprietry Software - The Pain!



Hi People,

This might not be classed as a debian problem per-se, but I'm wondering if
anybody here has any suggestions to get me out of this hole, a hole which is
probably more political than technical. Maybe somebody else has been in a
similar situation.

I'm in charge of a Linux Box which we use for VLSI (Silicon Chip Design)
work. Becuase of this, nearly all of the applications we run on the box are
proprietry, costing big bucks. Traditionally these have all run on Sun
Ultra's, but these are slow and expensive by comparision.

Now Application A (What the apps are really doesn't matter. They're closed,
I don't have source), for which the box was originally built, was developed
by the software house on Debian. So when it came time to build our box we
replicated their systems and used Debian (Testing). This also suited me for
obvious reasons.

This has worked so well that we're starting to look at running other jobs on
this box. This is where the problems start. Application B is supplied by a
different software house, one which has RedHat 6.2 as it's supported
platform. Unfortunatly, during trials we've observed stability problems,
with the application crashing in repeatable ways.

So, I sent a bug report to the developers of Application B, consisting of a
test case and ltrace log. They agreed to try to replicate the failure on
their machine (a RedHat box), but things failed to crash, and so I'm left
stuck.

Running through GDB shows a dereferenced pointer going wrong (not NULL, just
pointing to unmapped memory), so I'm pretty sure it's an app bug, but
because I'm not on the supported platform I can't get them to accept it. I
can't change to RedHat (even if I wanted to, which I don't) becuase that
would change things for the application that's working without (major)
problems, and unfortunatley I don't have any spare boxes to play with.

Does anybody have any ideas why one platform might show the problem and the
other hide it? My guess is that it's to do with the memory setup (see below)
changing the address space that the app is living in, but that's just a guess.

Has anybody else ever found themselves in a similar situation? Any
suggestions for how to get out?

Thanks

Paul

--------------------
Box Details:

AMD Athlon (Thunderbird) 1GHz
AMD 760 Chipset
2GB Physical RAM
4GB Swap
16GB IDE Hard Drive
Very little else

Software:
Debian Woody - Last updated about 4-5 months ago.
Kernel 2.2.20 (Compiled with 2GB Memory support) patched for ReiserFS
libc6          2.2.4-7 
libstdc++2.10  2.95.4-0.01100

--------------------

-- 
Paul Sargent
mailto: Paul.Sargent@3Dlabs.com



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