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

[R. Kannan]

The numerically intensive computing (NIC) at Ford used to have something called DFS, a file system for the CAE results which can run into several gigabytes of storage. I am not sure if that was the same as the one below. Users frequently lost connection to the files in the middle of their jobs (they used to call it Disappearing File System) and the help desk guys used to discourage use of DFS to store data. Finally NIC gave up on the system a couple of years back.Not sure what they use now.

-----Original Message-----
>From: Jeff Hanson <jhansonxi at gmail.com>
>Sent: Jun 14, 2008 2:14 PM
>To: MDLUG's Main discussion list <mdlug at mdlug.org>
>Subject: Re: [mdlug] stale NFS file handles - achille's heal of linux?
>
>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
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