Coda File System

Coda-6.9.1 released

From: Jan Harkes <jaharkes_at_cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 16:16:21 -0400
The new release is ready,

    Coda version 6.9.1
    RPC2 version 2.4
    RVM  version 1.14

Sources, Debian i386 packages and FedoraCore 5 i386 rpms can be found at

    ftp.coda.cs.cmu.edu:/pub/coda

Coda now works on 64-bit systems. The client and server were
successfully built and used on a machine with em64t extensions with a
64-bit Linux kernel. The new RVM-1.14 and RPC2-2.5 releases also
incorporate some essential 64-bit fixes.

Another welcome change is that venus now tries to keep cached access
rights available for users even across system reboot or client restart
which should improve life for people that frequently shut down or dual
boot their machines.

No changes for RVM data structures, it should be a matter of installing
the new versions and restarting your clients and servers.

Coda-6.9.1 changes::

    * A lot of 64-bit related fixes.
    * Allow access to cached files during disconnection if the user
      currently has no valid tokens, but did have access before the
      token expired.
    * Add venus.conf options for the default reintegration time and age
      parameters. Also increased default reintegration time to 5
      seconds.
    * New venus.conf option to allow backfetches (defaults to
      'disallow'). The default reintegration behaviour for store
      operations has been changed so that we always push new data to one
      server and then trigger resolution to bring the other replicas in
      sync. This push+resolve method uses less bandwidth, but is slower
      on a fast network compared to the old behaviour where all replicas
      connect back to the client and each would 'backfetch' a copy of
      the new file data. Aside from the reduced bandwidth usage, pushing
      the data from the client to the server makes file contents always
      traverse over authenticated (and more secure) connections.
    * cfs forcereintegrate failed to push the complete CML back to the
      server when we are weakly connected. This was because
      partialreintegrate (trickling a file back to one server and then
      resolving) returned as soon as one chunk was pushed back.
    * partialreintegration didn't fail when it encounted a server-server
      conflict but instead restarted reintegration from the beginning of
      the file.
    * au command would segfault if no realm is specified.
    * Reintegration for the local root user was extremely slow because
      of a bad test.
    * Changed naming of volume states, WriteDisconnected? is now
      'Reachable', Disconnected is now 'Unreachable'.
    * New venus.conf option 'isr'. This is a special feature when
      running in a virtual machine. Before deleting a container file,
      venus will first overwrite it with zeros. This should improve
      compression of the VM disk-image. As this isn't very useful for
      normal usage this option is disabled by default.

RPC2-2.5 changes::

    * Incorporated several contributed fixes for the build process. On
      systems with rpmbuild it should now be possible to enable the Lua
      hooks by running rpmbuild --with lua. However I'm getting rpmbuild
      failures when enabling that, so the prebuilt rpc2-2.5_1.i386.rpm
      is built without Lua support.
    * Default security setting has been changed to not allow the old
      (XOR-based) handshake for new connections. If your server still
      needs to allow clients that are still using a version or RPC2 that
      is older than release 2.0 it is possible to re-enable the old
      handshake by setting the RPC2SEC_ONLY environment variable to 'no'
      (or 0, or false).
    * Seed the PRNG by grabbing random data from /dev/urandom instead of
      the blocking /dev/random device. This fixes issues with random
      failures and timeouts especially while backups are running or
      stuck Coda processes shortly after a reboot.
    * And of course several 64-bit related fixes.

RVM-1.14 changes::

    * Fix an overflow when freeing RVM allocated memory on 64-bit.
Received on 2007-04-11 16:22:38