[OpenAFS] File locking in AFS

[Neulinger, Nathan]

> This has come up in the past. The general response I got was 
> that it would take some major tinkering with AFS to support 
> byte-level locking. The work around I came up with was to 
> mount things via Samba off of AFS. (Samba has a byte-level 
> locking fork.) The lack of byte-level locking is murder on 
> multi-user Excel spread sheets.

There's more to it than that... Is AFS safe for byte-level changes from
multiple clients, irrespective of locking?

i.e. when two separate clients have opened the same file, and they both make
changes near each other, what happens? Assume for the moment that the writes
are not done simultaneously, but that the files are opened simultaneously.
Does the client write only the changed bytes back to the server, or does it
write whole cache blocks?

-- Nathan

------------------------------------------------------------
Nathan Neulinger                       EMail:  nneul@umr.edu
University of Missouri - Rolla         Phone: (573) 341-4841
Computing Services                       Fax: (573) 341-4216