Coda File System

Re: CODA gotchas (was Re: CODA and crash recovery)

From: <u+codalist-wk5r_at_chalmers.se>
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2008 13:21:33 +0200
Hi Andrew,

On Sat, Jul 05, 2008 at 11:46:29PM -0400, Andrew Kohlsmith (lists) wrote:
> I haven't found CODA too bad, but there are some gotchas that keep biting me 
> and this seems as good a thread as any to hijack.  :-)

:)

> > find your files on Coda. (As a lot of software relies on $HOME, either
> > reset HOME or put symlinks in the $HOME directory - and you easily
> > access your files which are elsewhere on Coda)
> 
> You have to be very careful here.  I have found some KDE applications to be 
> particularly nasty about this.  Kopete for sure, and I think KMail as well.  
> You can give it a symlink but every now and again they get it in their head 
> that a symlink is no good, move/delete the symlink and recreate the entire 
> directory path for their configuration/logs/etc.

Ahh yes you are right of course... Such software is biting me sometimes also,
but rarely enough and I keep forgetting.

I don't think there is a general solution, a custom script to run on logout
possibly might help to work around some cases (maintain a list
of things that should be on Coda and at logout copy them there and replace
with a symlink). Not really robust, so I'd rather not.

> I dug around in the code a bit, and it appears that it's a kdelibs thing for 
> checking/creating the config and data directories.  I haven't looked at it 
> much in the past months, though.

Software which respects $HOME is mostly ok, but some inadequately
"paranoid" programs like ssh ignore $HOME and go look into /etc/passwd
to know "for sure" where I keep their config... ssh refuses also
to work with config on Coda (which _is_ properly protected, while
a traditional ~ on NFS3 makes ssh perfectly happy - ha-ha! :)
We are forced to patch this stupidity out of ssh in Dapty, to make it usable
with homedirs on Coda.

> I think my biggest sticking point (aside from KDE mentioned above) is that 
> when I am disconnected, I really do what what Windows 2000 gave me... a 
> real "make available offline" mode.  I know the mechanics of it... before I 

Hmm, isn't hoarding supposed to provide that?

> disconnect, cache everything.  However it's the sizing of the log that seems 
> that I don't have a grasp on.  Logic dictates that I would want a log as big 
> as the entire filesystem in order to access anything in the fs when 
> disconnected, no?

I guess there is some confusion of terms, the log is necessary to record
the possible change operations.
The data is in container files, not in the log itself.

Regards,
Rune
Received on 2008-07-07 07:21:30