[OpenAFS] AFS client not working any more with TABs in CellServDB

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

On Wednesday, March 03, 2004 08:15:54 +0100 Christophe BERNARD 
<Christophe.BERNARD@cmm.ensmp.fr> wrote:

> At startup, the afs client daemon failed, giving error messages like
> these:
>
>   afs: Lost contact with file server 10.0.0.1 in cell domain.com (all
>   multi-homed ip addresses down for the server)
>
> and later
>
>   afs: file server 10.0.0.1 in cell domain.com is back up (multi-homed
>   address; other same-host interfaces may still be down)

These messages would seem to indicate that your CellSerbDB entry was 
correctly parsed, and that the cache manager had some trouble talking to 
the fileserver (not the vldb server!) on 10.0.0.1.  If the CellServDB parse 
had failed, you would not have seen such messages.

> I replaced the [TAB] with spaces, and YES! it worked. So my 2c suggestion
> to the openafs team: would it be possible to make CellServDB file parsing
> by the client a wee more robust, like correctly skipping tabs like spaces,

Parsing of CellServDB lines uses sscanf, and is pretty permissive.
Any whitespace (or no whitespace) is permitted; tabs will work; spaces are 
not required.

> and even possibly logging warnings when not-ascii characters are met>
Non-ASCII characters are permitted, in the comments.  Of course they make 
no sense in IP addresses....


Can you reproduce the problem by changing the space back to a tab?

-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <jhutz+@cmu.edu>
   Sr. Research Systems Programmer
   School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility
   Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA