On Thu, 22 Apr 1999, Dave Hitz wrote:
These are things we need to fix.
(There will always be some secret commands that are used within engineering as part of our design and test scaffolding. We just need to take the position that when we learn a given command is useful externally, we should give it a face-lift and make it non-secret.)
I disagree, I think all commands (that perhaps don't give competitors an upper hand, although they're probably reverse engineering this stuff anyway) should be documented and released to the customers under a service contract or not. The world would be soo much better and technology would progress so much quicker if everyone documented and released their interfaces to the public.
That is not our intention, even if it looks that way!
I think NTAP 202 looks exactly this way.
The answer is simple. It's much easier to teach secret commands in classes than it is to write production quality documentation.
Easier, no. More profitable, certainly.
So while we're trying to get our arms around this problem in engineering, and figure out the best way to solve it going forward, the folks teaching classes are doing the right thing by sharing what they know, even if it does make you feel left out for not having taken a class.
With all due respect, the hidden commands were the only thing that I learned from NTAP 101 and NTAP 202 class material. The equipment we worked on was decrepit. We did not get to play with cluster failover, Fibre Channel, or trunking. Three things that are really important to me and I'm sure many of the people that were in class with me.
Tom