[OpenAFS-devel] Re: safe dropboxing in an anonymous world

[Derrick Brashear]

On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 3:35 PM, Andrew Deason <adeason@sinenomine.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 7 Feb 2011 19:50:40 +0000
> Simon Wilkinson <sxw@inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> On 7 Feb 2011, at 19:42, Derrick Brashear wrote:
>>
>> > I believe it to be possible but unlikely.
>>
>> It's also not possible to fix it just by changing the client behaviour
>> to only write dirty bytes (rather than dirty chunks) to the server. On
>> Linux, for example, we'll always write and read full pages. So, if you
>> were to write bytes 16-31, the kernel would ask AFS to read bytes
>> 0->4095 into memory, before performing the write. If you don't have
>> that page locally, then you would lose.
>
> Well, shoot. Scratch that, then. But even then, I agree that that alone
> is not a reason not to do this. Just something to make people aware of
> for whatever release (or something that is configurable, if someone
> cares enough about it, but I'd expect not).

my opinion is that it's not even worth a config setting. the risk is
low. and you'll get an error long before the write finishes.


-- 
Derrick