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From: jik@cats.ucsc.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Another reason I hate NFS: Silent data loss!
Message-ID: <17105@darkstar.ucsc.edu>
Date: 16 Jun 91 23:38:12 GMT
References: <4339.Jun1501.31.5191@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Sender: usenet@darkstar.ucsc.edu
Organization: University of California, Santa Cruz
Lines: 17

At Project Athena, we encountered both of the bugs mentioned by Dan in his
last posting (truncation of files and blocks full of nulls when writing to NFS
filesystems).  We fixed both of them, and sent patches back to Sun.  However,
I believe that our fixes required minor changes to the NFS protocol (I seem to
recall something about timestamping truncation requests so that retransmitted
requests would not cause files to be truncated after they had already started
to get data written into them), and I don't think Sun ever did anything with
them.

My point is that the problem is fixable, and it isn't even difficult to fix. 
Whether Sun (not to mention other vendors) has or will ever fix it is another
question entirely....

AFS is your friend. :-)

-- 
Jonathan Kamens					jik@CATS.UCSC.EDU