[bug-gnulib] Re: Possible problem with savedir.c (XFS over NFS)

[Andrew Reid]

On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 03:01:20PM +0000, James Youngman wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 01:51:49PM +0000, James Youngman wrote:
> > All,
> > 
> > This is just for your info really.  Some people have been reporting a
> > difficulty in using "find" on a GNU/Linux client accessing an NFS
> > filesystem mounted on Irix (the filesystem on the Irix box is XFS).
> 
> Someone has just pointed out to me that this may well be a Linux kernel bug:-
> 
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=180065
> 
> http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/cgi-bin/man/sgi_irix?exports+4 (see 
> '32bitclients')
> 
> Regards,
> James.

  Thanks for this info -- the sysadmin here followed the lead, starting
from the Debian link there, to a kernel workaround patch, which he
found at <http://www.fys.uio.no/~trondmy/src/>.  Under 2.4.26
(and probably others), there's the "seekdir" patch, which, it 
explains, 
> ...papers over a glibc bug. In glibc-2.2 and above, they use the new
> getdents64() syscall even for the 32-bit readdir. As a result, they
> have problems coping with the unsigned 64-bit d_off values that may
> get returned by some NFSv3 servers.
>
>   If you are seeing problems involving files that mysteriously 
> disappear from your directory listings, then please consider 
> applying this patch.

  We apparently were also having the disappearing-files problem,
although I was unaware of this until recently.  

  The patch has been applied to one of our Debian/Sarge NFS client 
machines which exhibited the "find" problem, and that machine can now 
run "find" on the mounted IRIX filesystems, where it couldn't before.  
It's not yet known whether it solves the disappearing-file problem.

  Since some of the destinations here may not be aware of it, the
"find" problem is described at:
<http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=241538>.

                                -- A.
-- 
Dr. Andrew C. E. Reid, Guest Researcher 
Center for Theoretical and Computational Materials Science
National Institute of Standards and Technology, Mail Stop 8500
Gaithersburg MD 20899 USA
address@hidden