Re: CVS, NFS Filesystem, and failover

[Larry Jones]

Andrew McGhee writes:
> 
> I've heard it mentioned on this newsgroup that mixing NFS with CVS is a bad
> idea.
>
> Can anyone elaborate more one this?

There have been lots of reports of repository corruption caused by
interoperability problems between different NFS client and server
implementations.  The most common problem is missing data: the file
contains a block of NULs instead of the correct data.

Since you're considering using a system that is specifically designed to
be an NFS server, it's reasonable to conclude that it has been throughly
tested with a wide variety of client implementations and thus is
unlikely to have such problems, particularly if the NFS client machine
is a common commercial platform.  I would be much more cautious with
something like a Linux machine, since the server manufacturer has
probably not tested it as extensively, if at all.  (Many of the reports
of corruption have involved Linux, but it's impossible to tell whether
that means that Linux is more trouble prone or just more popular.  If it
is more trouble prone, it's impossible to tell whether that is because
of bugs in the Linux NFS code or if it just exposes bugs in the other
machine's server code.)

So, it isn't necessarily a bad idea, but I would proceed cautiously. 
You might want to grab the script that was posted here a while back to
check the repository for damage and run it nightly for a while.

-Larry Jones

Somebody's always running my life.  I never get to do what I want to do.
-- Calvin