DeadHead@cup.portal.com (Bruce M Ong) (07/24/90)
The NFS on my unix i386 (2.0.2) seems to crash my sparc station from time to time. When the sparc (sun os 4.03) mounts a partition from the 386 box, once in a while the console would complain "rfs: attempt to read from non-file". And about every few weeks my entire screen would all of a sudden be filled with messages like that, and the only way to stop it is to halt the sparc with L1-A. It doesnt happen when the 386 box mounts a sparc partition. Has anybody seen the same prlblem? I wonder if it has been reported to ISC or Sun, or if I should file a bug report at both companies. (I never did find out what "attempt to read from non-file" actually means"). thanks, bruce deadhead@cup.portal.com
guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) (07/25/90)
>When the sparc (sun os 4.03) mounts a partition from the 386 box, once >in a while the console would complain "rfs: attempt to read from non-file". >And about every few weeks my entire screen would all of a sudden be filled >with messages like that, and the only way to stop it is to halt the >sparc with L1-A. OK, which console is "the console" - the one on the 386 box or the one on the Sun? The message is printed by the NFS server code (you don't get it from the client code), and means that a client has obtained a file handle for something other than a plain file and has told the NFS server to read data from that file; the server disallows this.
rmf@media.uucp (Roger Fujii) (07/25/90)
DeadHead@cup.portal.com (Bruce M Ong) writes: >The NFS on my unix i386 (2.0.2) seems to crash my sparc station from time >to time. >When the sparc (sun os 4.03) mounts a partition from the 386 box, once >in a while the console would complain "rfs: attempt to read from non-file". he he... >And about every few weeks my entire screen would all of a sudden be filled >with messages like that, and the only way to stop it is to halt the >sparc with L1-A. better yet, reboot the 386. >It doesnt happen when the 386 box mounts a sparc partition. This is because the SUN knows better.... >Has anybody seen the same prlblem? I wonder if it has been reported to ISC >or Sun, or if I should file a bug report at both companies. (I never did >find out what "attempt to read from non-file" actually means"). This is a bug with most likely the C-shell. You get that horrid message when you try to open via nfs a directory like a file (instead of the dirent method). If I remember correctly, you can duplicate this if you put an NFS directory in you path. Solution: Don't do that! (or use bsh...) -- Roger Fujii - Media Cybernetics Phone: (301)495-3305 Internet: rmf%media@uunet.uu.net UUCP: {uunet,hqda-ai}!media!rmf
guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) (07/28/90)
>This is because the SUN knows better....
In particular, SunOS has, since 3.0 if I remember correctly, rejected,
on the client side, any attempt to open a directory over NFS.
Methinks the NFS's on S5/386 should do so as well, the prevalence of
crappy programs that still open and read directories themselves rather
than going through the directory library nonwithstanding; those programs
are in for a rude surprise if the NFS server 1) doesn't reject attempts
to read from a directory over the wire and 2) doesn't have the same
directory format *AND* the same byte order as the client, and it's time
they were hit upside the head and fixed (they're going to fail miserably
in S5R4 even on local file systems, if the local file system is UFS
rather than S5FS; 4.[23]BSD directory entries do *not* look like V7
directory entries!).