Buyer Beware: A Major Change in NFS is about to happen

[Steve Dickson]

On 09/30/2009 07:05 AM, Andrew Haley wrote:
>>> I can't see how it would cause a mount storm: all you'd be doing is
>>> issuing a mount request twice, once in each protocol.  
>> Times 1000 very 5 seconds...
> 
> So 2000 every 5 seconds as opposed to 1000 every 5 seconds.  This is
> surely better than returning an incorrect "directory does not exist"
> response to almost every NFS user who upgrades.  And it will be almost
> everyone: maintaining servers on older versions of RHEL and upgrading
> clients to recent Fedora is normal.
Or the F-12 clients can change the default back to v3 by either 
setting the  Nfsvers=3 variable the NFSMount_Global_Options section
in the /etc/nfsmount.conf file, or set the '-o v3' mount option on
the command line.

> 
>> I really don't think the server people would appreciate all those
>> extra cycles and network traffic... Doing something like this would
>> be hack... a hack that I could not push upstream...  There are other
>> workagrounds (defined in original mail) that I would rather
>> explore...
> 
> But they are all pretty unpleasant.  The user gets an obscure error
> message that indicates nothing to them except "NFS is broken".
> They then have to either export root from the server or edit their
> fstab.
I'm not sure I agree with the "obscure error message", but yes the
client will have to change when mount to a older Linux server, 
only a Linux server btw...

> 
>> I don't see how pushing, incorporating and utilizing the latest
>> technology available can "severely damaging the reputation of
>> Fedora".
> 
> Really?  Why not?  What you are proposing to is indistinguishable to a
> user from breaking NFS.  I can easily see it.
With all new release of Fedora (or any OS for that matter) there are always 
some pain threshold people have to go through. I just see this is one 
those thresholds..

> 
>> To be quite frank, my goal is just the opposite... I want Fedora
>> have a reputation of being on the breaking edge of technology... I
>> think that is a good thing!
> 
> Me too.  So, let's see how we can do that without making Fedora more
> fragile.
I can't agree with this more...

steved.