[15542] in Athena Bugs
Re: sparc 8.1: pwd/afs lossage (3.4a.patches.4)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ted McCabe)
Mon Sep 29 15:33:58 1997
Date: Mon, 29 Sep 1997 15:33:56 -0400
From: Ted McCabe <ted@MIT.EDU>
To: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
Cc: bugs@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: "[15536] in Athena Bugs"
It seems that the client's id of the current working directory (as
reported by "pwd") seems to vary based on the last mountpoint through
which a directory was accessed.
This "problem" has existed for nearly a decade, if not longer. The
difficulty stems from the fact that the root directory of a volume
needs some idea of where '..' is. Conventional filesystem semantics
guarantee that '..' is well-defined.
By double mounting an AFS volume you in effect specify that '..' is no
longer well-defined for that volume. This is because from the
client's point of view there is no way to know which '..' is desired.
Since it is administratively useful to mount volumes in multiple
locations, the solution was to no longer require that '..' be
well-defined in a volume's root directory.
--Ted
