From owner-freebsd-security  Thu Mar  6 23:52:54 1997
Return-Path: <owner-security>
Received: (from root@localhost)
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id XAA24106
          for security-outgoing; Thu, 6 Mar 1997 23:52:54 -0800 (PST)
Received: from gvr.win.tue.nl (root@gvr.win.tue.nl [131.155.210.19])
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id XAA24098
          for <freebsd-security@freebsd.org>; Thu, 6 Mar 1997 23:52:49 -0800 (PST)
Received: (from guido@localhost) by gvr.win.tue.nl (8.8.5/8.8.2) id IAA01682; Fri, 7 Mar 1997 08:52:18 +0100 (MET)
From: Guido van Rooij <guido@gvr.win.tue.nl>
Message-Id: <199703070752.IAA01682@gvr.win.tue.nl>
Subject: Re: 4.4BSD NFS File Handles (fwd)
In-Reply-To: <199703070602.WAA17190@freefall.freebsd.org> from Mike Pritchard at "Mar 6, 97 10:02:49 pm"
To: mpp@freefall.freebsd.org (Mike Pritchard)
Date: Fri, 7 Mar 1997 08:52:18 +0100 (MET)
Cc: danny@panda.hilink.com.au, freebsd-security@freebsd.org
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL28 (25)]
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Sender: owner-security@freebsd.org
X-Loop: FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

Mike Pritchard wrote:
> Daniel O'Callaghan wrote:
> > 
> > In addition to returning traditional information, such as the creation time,
> > size, inode number and last modification time, the 4.4BSD stat(2) system
> > call and related functions return a field called st_gen.  The st_gen field
> > is a 4 byte value which is different for each item on the filesystem.
> 
> I've worked on other systems in the past where we only returned
> st_gen if the caller was root.
> 
> If I remember right, the last time I looked at how the kernel
> assigned generation number, it didn't do a very good job
> of it (they were pretty predictable).  We should probaby
> change them to use the random() kernel function.

I also want to have the fsirand stuff. That should be enough. Perhaps
it should even be built in newfs.

-Guido