Re: NCPfs still buggy (and crashes netware server)

Bill Hawes (whawes@star.net)
Fri, 31 Oct 1997 07:50:42 -0500


Tore Olsen wrote:
> I upgraded our webserver to 2.0.31 yesterday, in the hope that the
> bugs in ncpfs we were experiencing would go away, but that didn't
> happen. (We're running the web-pages from a netware server, don't ask
> why.)
>
> I get lots of messages like these:
> ncp_put_inode: inode in use device 00:0a, inode 34215841, count=2
> ncp_put_inode: inode in use device 00:0a, inode 609381, count=2
>
> The inodes usually belong to .htaccess files, whatever that means.
>
> I wrote a small program that would fork(), and repeatedly open() and
> close() the same file, and that seems to trigger the bug.
>
> Another thing is that after a few days with this behaviour, unmounting
> the ncp filesystem actually crashes the Netware server. So there must
> be a bug in Novell's software too. :-)

Hi Tore,

The "inode in use" message isn't a bug -- it shows that the software has
detected what was formerly a bug, and is now handling the case
correctly. I made these changes back in June, working with Troels
Arvin. At that time he too had a problem with the Novell server
crashing, which I think went away with a server upgrade. You can
comment out the message if you like.

> Seeing Linus' note about preparing for 2.2, and ncpfs not being ready
> for that, I really hope that Someone (tm) will understand what's
> wrong, and fix it for 2.0.32 as well.

The ncpfs for 2.1.xx is an entirely different matter; it needs some work
to adapt to the many 2.1.xx-specific changes. But if you find specific
bugs in 2.0.xx ncpfs, please report them so we can look into it.

Regards,
Bill