[332] in Athena Bugs
Re: super-block question
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Henry Mensch)
Thu May 5 19:08:27 1988
From: Henry Mensch <henry@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
To: <custer@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
Cc: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of Tue, 26 Apr 88 22:24:09 -0400.
Date: Thu, 05 May 88 18:51:49 EDT
> I watched someone save a buffer from emacs into apparent oblivion.
> Somehow or another, the super-block did not update. The file looked
> like it was there when you did an "ls -als" but when you tried to cat
> the file, it was not there. Syncing remidied the situation.
Um, what you experienced sounds like the normal thing to happen when
you're using NFS on a busy network. Syncing doesn't "fix" anything
here; time does (to my experience). Particularly on a busy network,
it sometimes takes some time for the data to get from your workstation
to the file server. At any rate, a daemon called "update" insures
that the superblock gets updated properly and that all the pending
data gets written.
> 3) What would have happened if the user had logged out and logged back
> in again? Would the file have reappeared, would it have disappeared
> completely, or would it still be around the next time the super-block
> gets updated?
I imagine the file would have been there, as expected.
This is the first time I've had someone report this. I'll keep an eye
out for this, should it become a problem.
--
-- Henry Mensch / <henry@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
-- Project Athena Quality Assurance
