[OpenAFS-devel] [OSX] Service startup proposal

[Derek Atkins]

Roland Kuhn <rkuhn@e18.physik.tu-muenchen.de> writes:

> Question to the gurus: How difficult would it be to make AFS behave  
> when faced with loss of networking? What I'm thinking about is a mode  
> where you get EIO (or something) for all requests concerning AFS  
> instead of having to wait three minutes for an answer which is  
> guaranteed not to come. This can easily be found out using some cocoa  
> interface (forgot the name of the function). It would also be nice to  
> be able to unmount AFS _after_ the network problems have started.

There are some patches in AFS to do this..  In particular in RX.  But
because RX is based on UDP, it requires that the UDP layer actually
return an ICMP Host Unreachable message back to the caller stack.
Most OSes do not return this type of error, so there's no feedback
that the sending failed.

On linux this error IS returned, so AFS does time out much quicker
when the network goes away.

-derek
-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
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