Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!osu-cis!tut!triceratops!karl
From: karl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: GNUemacs on SUNS: full partitions and NFS timeouts
Message-ID: <6187@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 8 Feb 88 15:16:51 GMT
References: <13252@cornell.UUCP>
Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Distribution: comp
Lines: 17
In-reply-to: murthy@arvak's message of 7 Feb 88 17:56:21 GMT

murthy@arvak writes:
   When I run on a SUN-3, if the partition is full, or the NFS
   write times out, or perhaps the create does, then GNUemacs
   will not report this error all the time.  This results in
   truncated (to zero length) or nonexistent files, and on a
   heavily loaded Ethernet, it can result in all versions of
   the file being lost.  Has anybody else out there seen this
   happen?

Try mounting your filesystems hard.  (/etc/fstab's 4th parameter.)
With "hard" mounting, your workstation will wait forever for the
server to come back to life before return from the write() or
close().  It sounds like you're using soft mounts, which allow you to
keep doing things in the face of a server's failure, but loses the
guarantee of writes being done as requested by the program.
-=-
Karl