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Message-Id: <199510091853.AA087414802@hpnmhjw.sr.hp.com>
To: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
Cc: alan@niceguy.isocor.ie (Alan Byrne),
        freebsd-questions@freefall.freebsd.org
Subject: Re: File Corruption Problem 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 06 Oct 1995 14:20:11 PDT."
             <199510062120.OAA02102@phaeton.artisoft.com> 
Date: Mon, 09 Oct 1995 11:53:21 -0700
From: Darryl Okahata <darrylo@hpnmhjw.sr.hp.com>
Sender: owner-questions@FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> wrote:

> > The RCS tree is NFS mounted on a number of various unix platforms, and 
> > people check-out and check-in the files on these platforms (over NFS). 
> > Could the problem be related to NFS file locking problems, or is it a 
> > symptom of some other form of filesystem corruption.
> 
> Are you doing potentially simultaneous updates?
> 
> The problem is that RCS doesn't support this; use CVS instead (it's built
> on top of RCS).

     Have the newer versions of RCS changed?  We've been using
NFS-mounted RCS directories for *years*, without any problems.  We are,
however, still using a pretty old version of RCS, which uses lock files
to prevent simultaneous access.  Here, if two people try to
*simultaneously* access an RCS file, one person gets an "RCS file XXX is
in use" error.

[ Well, we did have one problem years ago, but that was caused by a
networking/NFS bug, which doesn't apply to FreeBSD as these systems
aren't running FreeBSD.  Hmm.  Now that I think of it, that problem does
seem similar to Alan's, as I seem to recall the RCS files getting lots
of binary zeros in them.  ]

     -- Darryl Okahata
	Internet: darrylo@sr.hp.com

DISCLAIMER: this message is the author's personal opinion and does not
constitute the support, opinion or policy of Hewlett-Packard or of the
little green men that have been following him all day.