idall@augean.ua.oz.au (Ian Dall) (06/12/90)
We have a sun4 named crackle and a sun3 named basil. Both run SunOS 4.0.3. Basil has a small disk, but most user files reside on a crackle partition which is NFS mounted on basil. If I update the file on crackle using emacs. I can then cat the file on crackle and basil and get different results. This is not reproducable on demand, but once the two machines have become inconsistent, it tends to stay that way. Emacs renames the old file and creates a new one when you update a file. For definiteness, consider a file called foo :-) When I update it, it is renamed to foo~ and a new file foo is created. An ls -i on both machines shows that the inode basil thinks is associated with foo is actually the inode of foo~ on crackle. It seems that directory entries are being cached incoherently! BSD has some hash table to speed up directory lookups doesn't it? My bet is that Sun thought through the disk block buffer consistency problem, but forgot about this directory hash table! Has anyone else seen this? Ian Dall ACSnet: idall@augean.oz Internet: idall@augean.oz.au