[OpenAFS] Problems with 1.3.78 and 2.6.10

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

On Thursday, February 17, 2005 07:41:29 AM +0000 Dr A V Le Blanc 
<LeBlanc@mcc.ac.uk> wrote:

> Recently I've been experimenting with Linux 1.6.10 and openafs 1.3.78.
> I have compiled these using gcc 3.3.5, 3.0.4, and 2.95, always of
> course using the same compiler for the kernel and for openafs.
> I have run 'configure --with-afs-sysname=i386_linux26
> --with-linux-kernel-headers=whatever', and I have had similar problems
> on all three systems on which I have tried this: a file written into
> AFS get created, but contains no data.  For example:
>
>      $ ls -l harry fred
> ls: fred: No such file or directory
> -rw-------  1 root root 4301 Feb 16 09:58 harry
>      $ cat harry >fred
>      $ ls -l harry fred
> -rw-------  1 root root    0 Feb 17 07:37 fred
> -rw-------  1 root root 4301 Feb 16 09:58 harry
>      $ fs lq .
> Volume Name                   Quota      Used %Used   Partition
> user.whatever                300000    187960   63%          9%
>
>      I'm not seeing these problems with 1.2.13 on 2.4.28 or on
> 2.4.29, for that matter.  Has anyone else seen this?

And I'll bet if you run dmesg, you'll see a message like
"afs: failed to store file (network problems)".

This happens if you have a fileserver that does not support the largefile 
extensions, and attempt to store data there without first having read 
something from that fileserver since booting.  During a read, the cache 
manager correctly detects that the fileserver does not have largefile 
support and caches that information.  The equivalent code path for writes 
is broken.

Because largefile support was added to the client on the unstable (1.3) 
branch, you won't see this problem with 1.2.  It has been corrected in CVS 
and the fix will be in the next release.

-- Jeff