dwight@uunet.uu.net (Dwight Ernest) (02/22/89)
Greetings. We are running PC-NFS on about 50 PCs. The lockd(8) under SunOS3.5 handles DOS 3.3-style advisory locking rather well between peer clients (i.e., one PC cannot open a file for write when another PC already has it open). Meanwhile, we have some utilities which need to modify some of the files that live in Sun directories that are mounted by PC clients through PC-NFS. Naturally, we wanted to take advantage of the apparently well-implemented advisory file locking and write our Unix application in a way that made the lockd(8) daemon satisfied. That is, it would check for a lock before molesting a file, set a lock if one were not already set, then clear it when finished. Good idea in principal, right? Basic systems integration. The problem is that locks set under Unix (using either the more difficult and verbose fcntl(2) method or the somewhat easier lockf(3) method) do not appear to be honored by the client PCs. And locks set by PC-NFS do not appear to be honored by lock checks using either of those two methods under SunOS. Hopes dashed. Running rpc.lockd with debugging (set at level 10), I find this confirmed: the diagnostics printed by the PC clients is significantly shorter and quite different from that printed by the SunOS lock and release stuff. I can send examples if anyone is interested. Can anyone offer any pointers to this dilemma? Am I coding my test program wrong? (I can send that, as well; it's brief.) Surely it's likely that someone has been through this jungle before. Thanks in advance! --Dwight Ernest Technical Systems Coordinator The Independent (Newspaper Publishing PLC) 40 City Road, London EC1Y 2DB Phone: +44 1 956 1633 ...ukc!independent!dwight
worley@compass.com (Dale Worley) (12/28/89)
I've been having horrible troubles getting fcntl() file locking to work. I gather from various remarks that lockd is known to be pretty flakey, and I'm not encouraged by knowing that our workstations are Suns but our file server is a Vax running Ultrix. Does anyone know what the quality of the various lockd implementations are, and whether there are known problems with mixing Suns and Ultrix's in this regard? Dale Worley Compass, Inc. worley@compass.com
worley@compass.com (Dale Worley) (03/09/90)
We are running SunOS 4.0.3 and have been having problems with lockd for quite some time, in particular, it crashes, leaving every process which attempts to do file locking hung. We have installed the (apparently) most recent Sun patch (the one that fixes bugs 1020255 and 1012118), but that doesn't help much at all. This situation is completely unacceptable, given the amount of money we have spent on our systems. When is Sun going to get the basic Unix facilities working, rather than merely charging for them? Dale Worley Compass, Inc. worley@compass.com