[OpenAFS] Re: symbolic link path length?

[Andrew Deason]

On Tue, 28 Aug 2012 15:02:23 -0600
"Kristen J. Webb" <kwebb@teradactyl.com> wrote:

> We found an AFS volume with a symbolic link of
> length of 7943 bytes (from vos dump).
> 
> Does anyone know the theoretical
> maximum length for a symlink in AFS?

There is a wire protocol limit of 1024 octets for a symlink target (or
1023; I'm not sure if that counts a trailing NUL). I'm not sure if there
are other limitations for on-disk formats (probably no) or OS VFS layers
(probably yes).

As far as the volume dump format itself goes, they can probably be as
long as a 32-bit signed length will hold; not that you want to actually
handle them that large.

> Should we consider salvaging this volume instead?

It's probably not "real", yeah, unless someone was doing something
strange.

-- 
Andrew Deason
adeason@sinenomine.net