Coda File System

Announcing Coda release 5.3.19

From: Jan Harkes <jaharkes_at_cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 18:24:10 -0500
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.exe
Received on 2002-03-12 18:46:26