[6893] in bugtraq
Re: mean vfs bug in *bsd
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brian Feldman)
Mon Jun 1 16:46:18 1998
Date: Sun, 31 May 1998 00:44:50 -0400
Reply-To: Brian Feldman <green@FELDMAN.DYN.ML.ORG>
From: Brian Feldman <green@FELDMAN.DYN.ML.ORG>
To: BUGTRAQ@NETSPACE.ORG
> As we upgraded to freeBSD 2.2.6-STABLE the following bug came to my
attention:
> when linking a device like /dev/null to a file on a NFS mounted fs
> the machien freeses.
A hard link links via a true link, as follows: a symlink is just a
specially marked file with the path and name of another file which it
refers to. A _hard_ link creates a new fs entry and sets its data inode
number to point to that of the other file, in which case it becomes the
file. In this way a hard link does NOT traverse different file
systems/mount points whatsoever. I'm pretty certain your /dev is locally
mounted, not by NFS, therefore I tend to believe that you shouldn't even
be attempting a hard link. If in actuality, this does occur linking two
files, one a device, both on the same NFS filesystem, then this is
significant, otherwise it just means that ln(1) needs to have some better
error-checking so it doesn't make hard links span drives.
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my->name = "Brian Feldman";
my->email[0] = "brianfeldman@hotmail.com";
my->email[1] = "green@feldman.dyn.ml.org";
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