[comp.sys.sun] Strange NFS behaviour under 4.1

ehrlich@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu (Dan Ehrlich) (10/27/90)

On a number of occasions on assorted systems (sun4, sun4c, sun3) all
running SunOS 4.1 strange NFS happening have been observed.

1) Files that are symbolic links are not listed as such.  I.E. ls -lF does
   not show 'l' but 'd' as the first character on the line.

2) Sometimes a directory under NFS mount point will dissapear but it's
   siblings and parent are still accessable.  The file system was mounted
   read-only.  Typing sync on the client cleared this up.

3) Quotas do not seem to be getting updated properly if at all.

Has anyone else seen this behaviour?  Does anyone know if there is a fix?

Thanks,
Confused and concerned in central PA.

Dan Ehrlich <ehrlich@cs.psu.edu>/Voice: +1 814 863 1142/FAX: +1 814 865 3176

chris@com50.c2s.mn.org (Chris Johnson) (11/21/90)

In article <1990Oct26.221737.18973@rice.edu> ehrlich@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu (Dan Ehrlich) writes:
>
>On a number of occasions on assorted systems (sun4, sun4c, sun3) all
>running SunOS 4.1 strange NFS happening have been observed.
>
>1) Files that are symbolic links are not listed as such.  I.E. ls -lF does
>   not show 'l' but 'd' as the first character on the line.

Dan mentions some other problems.  I have not even seen the above problem,
but it just reminded me of a recent horrifying experience while I was
dialed into a customer system cleaning things up and moving things around
in preparation for a reconfiguration.  I used "rm" to remove a symbolic
link on a diskless client which pointed to an NFS mounted directory.  I
did a few other things and then returned to the server, from where I was
rlogin'd, and tried to do a "ps".  Woops, no such command.  Gack!  Turns
out my little symbolic link removal on the client had instead removed
EVERYTHING in the server's directory.  That directory just happened to be
/usr/kvm.

Maybe there is something weird with NFS and symbolic links on 4.1.  But
I'm not sure I want to test it out!  I'm afraid of what might be removed
next. :-)

   ...Chris Johnson          chris@c2s.mn.org   ..uunet!bungia!com50!chris
 Com Squared Systems, Inc.   St. Paul, MN USA   +1 612 452 9522