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Date:      Sun, 20 Aug 95 13:40:33 MDT
From:      terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert)
To:        dima@bog.msu.su (Dmitry Khrustalev)
Cc:        hackers@freefall.FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: Making a FreeBSD NFS server
Message-ID:  <9508201940.AA22999@cs.weber.edu>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.91.950820080008.552A-100000@sunny.bog.msu.su> from "Dmitry Khrustalev" at Aug 20, 95 09:04:04 am

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> > You can turn on async writes in the BSD NFS server.
> > 
> > Be warned that, though Sun and SVR4 do this too, this is a cache
> > coherency violation and can result in Bad Things Happening in case
> > of a server power failure or other failure that results in the
> > server going down, then coming back up while the app on a client
> > is still running.  This is because the client will think the data
> > was written and may depend on being able to retrieve it later
> > (ie: a database index).
> 
> Wrong, Sun had never included a method for enabling async writes in their os.
> ( other than adb, anyway). Ditto SVR4. SGI ships their boxes with async 
> writes turned on by default, their reasoning is that every server is 
> protected by UPS.

Green and white NetWork Administration Manual, about bage 128?  I remember
it was a nice binary page number...

It's a debug statement you put in /etc/rc, and it was there by default
the last time I looked at the Solaris systems I use.  I'm not the only
one with root, though, so I could be mistaken.

I think it gets added at the same time as the "security fix" to disallow
subdir mounts.


> No, NFSv3 does not include cache coherency protocol.
> 
> Quoting v3 rfc: 
> 
> 	Neither the NFS version 2 protocol nor the NFS version 3
> 	protocol provide a means of maintaining strict client-server
> 	consistency (and, by implication, consistency across client
> 	caches).
> 
> What it does is implement is *safe* async writes.

Ah, Okie-doke.  I thought I remembered it from the Sun draft paper of
over a year and a half ago.

> > Since I *don't* want everyone going of and tweaking their systems
> > for async NFS writes unless they are *deadly* serious, you can dig
> > the information out of the docs and sources yourself.

Correct my previous post to say "don't enable async writes, ever, it's
not worth it (unless you have a UPS on your server).


					Terry Lambert
					terry@cs.weber.edu
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.



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