Re: Urgent help needed on an NFS question, please help!!!

[Peter Staubach <staubach@redhat.com>]

Xin Zhao wrote:
> That makes sense.
>
> Can we make the following two conclusions?
> 1. In a single machine, inode+dev ID+i_generation can uniquely 
> identify a file
> 2. Given a stored file handle and an inode object received from the
> server,  an NFS client can safely determine whether this inode
> corresponds to the file handle by checking the inode+dev+i_generation.
>

#1 seems to safe enough to assume.

#2 either doesn't make sense to me or is assuming things about the file 
handle
that the client is not allowed to assume.  A file handle is an opaque string
of bytes to the client.  The only entity allowed to interpret the contents
is the entity which generated the file handle.

---

Is this situation any different than an application opens file, "A".  
Another
process then renames "A" to "B".  Now, the original application is 
reading and
writing from and to a file called "B" and has no knowledge of this.

---

The bottom line is that the file handle uniquely identifies a particular
entity on a file system on the server.  The name of the entity does not
matter.

    Thanx...

       ps