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From: thurlow@convex.com (Robert Thurlow)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.nfs
Subject: Re: NFS client has out-of-date files
Message-ID: <1967@convex.UUCP>
Date: 5 Oct 89 17:44:24 GMT
References: <17787@bellcore.bellcore.com>
Sender: news@convex.UUCP
Distribution: na
Lines: 30

tr@bellcore.com (tom reingold) writes:
>A user was working on two Suns simultaneously.  He was editing one file
>on one Sun, and reading the file using LaTeX on the other.  The file
>was NFS mounted on both Suns.  It physically resided on the NFS server,
>a Pyramid.  One of the Suns had an out-of-date copy!  It was a minute
>old.

>Unmounting the filesystem on the Sun client and remounting it fixed the
>problem.

We've had this; what seems to be a common cause for it is that the
time is not synchronized between the updating client and the server,
so the file attributes don't get through the server and show up on
disk until something changes ("gee, 'now' plus one minute - I think
I'll hang onto this request for awhile").  Moving the file to a new
name and back seemed to be another work-around here.  Are you running
the time daemon, or did you check for a system time difference?  This
may not be the only cause of the problem.

>This is disturbing.  I would like to know what causes this.  If I have
>to live with it, I would like to know what workarounds exist other than
>remounting.  Of course, users cannot do this, and I am not always
>around to do it for them.

And please post!  I want to know the answer to this, too.

Rob T
--
Rob Thurlow - Expatriate Canadian                      thurlow@convex.com
"From the heart of 'The Friendship State'"