(Illustration by Gaich Muramatsu)
The release tagged as "Coda 5.3.19" is available for download. This release 'leapfrogs' over a previously un-announced release that wasn't all that good for anyone who wanted to set up a Coda server. For this release I've exhaustively tested setting up both SCM and non-SCM Coda servers as well as upgrading a non-SCM server. So I hope everyone who has been having difficulties setting up their servers will have a smoother experience. The second really great thing is that 5.3.19 contains the first public release of an alpha distribution of Coda for Windows NT 4, Windows 2000 and Windows XP. This first public release is called the "Alpha-7" of the Windows code. Phil Nelson put a lot of sweat and tears in this one, so give it a try and some positive feedback ;) More information is appended to the end of this announcement. Important changes as of Coda release 5.3.17, Coda clients * RPM postinstall fix to create a correct /dev/cfs0. * Debian postinstall and reconfigure cleanups and fixes. * Server conflicts got a client in an endless loop during trickle reintegration. * Hopefully got things to work better on devfs systems (Rajesh Balan). * Updates for Windows XP support (Phil Nelson). * Added CODACONFPATH environment variable to allow changing which configuration files Coda applications use. * Although Coda only 'supports' the mtime of objects, we were passing an unusually bad ctime down to the kernel, * We dropped a lock in a critical area during Access permission checks. This might have been a cause of some of the unexplainable crashes when clients are fetching/discarding many cached-objects. * Repair is now more resilient when not all replicas are found. Coda servers * Stricter checking when reading /vice/db/servers, bad hostname lookups or identical server-id's assigned to multiple servers are now caught sooner. * The evil strncmp on ip-addresses bug (Ivan Popov) * No longer reordering hosts in a VSG, it is not advised to switch back to an older release after creating volumes with the new code. * Server statistics (volutil printstats) now include the global RDS allocation statistics. I.e. now we can answer the basic question, how much RVM is actually allocated. Building * Readline related build fixed from Greg Troxel. * Some bad C++ code was being 'mis-compiled' by gcc-3.0.x which were causing bad crashes (Rajesh). * Fixed rvmutl/rdsinit search when running configure. ======================================================================== Coda for Windows NT, 2000 and XP is using a File System Development Kit (FSDK) provided by Open Systems Resources, Inc. (See their data sheet at http://www.osr.com/toolkits_fsdk.shtml) This kit has made writing a Coda file system for Windows much easier. The FSDK is a commercial, closed source product. For this initial distribution of Coda for Windows NT, 2000, and XP, a single binary is available that performs a binary installation of the Coda File System kernel module and the complete userland binaries. The only part of the source code that will not be available is for the kernel module that is based on OSR's FSDK. Full source is available for the userland binaries. The current alpha distribution has been tested on NT, 2000 and XP pro. We currently have not tested it on XP home edition. The userland binaries require that Cygwin is installed on any machine using Coda. When using a cygwin shell, Coda files appear in their "normal" location as /coda/... and access to Coda for Windows applications is via a drive letter. This drive letter is configurable in the venus.conf configuration file. The installation process sets the initial value as part of configuration at installation time. The Coda client for NT/2000/XP can be found at, ftp://ftp.coda.cs.cmu.edu/pub/coda/winnt/codacli-a7.exeReceived on 2002-03-12 18:46:26