[mdlug] stale NFS file handles - achille's heal of linux?

[Jeff Hanson]

On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 1:54 PM, Jeff Hanson <jhansonxi at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 10:37 AM, Dean Durant <mdlug at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>>This turned out to be very bad and the CAE manager who hates linux blamed it all on linux.

For the record, I don't think Windows or any other OS could do it
either.  The closest you could get with Windows is to use "offline
files" which from my experience is not really reliable.  I used it for
about two years with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.  It basically
caches network files locally and switches between them based on
availability.  It doesn't handle database files and occasionally will
desync or start ignoring some files due to cache and tracking database
corruption.

Windows "Distributed File System" is an abstraction layer for network
share access.  I've used it for abstraction (with drive letter
mapping) but not for redundancy.  It works but I haven't used anything
similar on Linux so I can't provide an opinion on it.  NFS sort of
does this (http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-nfsv4.html)
but there are many specialized protocols which do it better:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAFS