cvs_over_nfs

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Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2000 20:50:25 -0700
From: kevin@ank.com
To: svlug@svlug.org
Subject: Re: [svlug] Simple debate?

On Thu, Sep 07, 2000 at 01:15:19AM -0700, Dan Martinez wrote:
> J. Paul Reed wrote:
>  
> > I have one question, and I only ask because I've heard a number of
> > (different) responses (just like the old Usenet days), and I'd like
> > to know for sure from those out in the field:
> > 
> > CVSROOT on an NFS mount: acceptable, or no?
> 
> Note that the follow is merely an anecdotal data point, rather than
> any kind of attempt at a definitive answer.
> 
> My current employer has been using an NFS-mounted CVSROOT for over a
> year now, without any observed catastrophic effects. Qualifications:
> 
> 1. The machine actually doing the serving is a Network Appliance box.
>    NetApps, for those unfamiliar with them, run proprietary
>    implementations of the NFS and SMB protocols, among others. This
>    may make it slightly dangerous to assume that something which works
>    on a NetApp will automatically work in the same way on a "normal"
>    NFS server.
> 
> 2. Every now and then we run across a stale CVS lockfile. A few weeks
>    ago we had a veritable rash of them, apparently as the result of a
>    "tweak" to the NetApp on the part of our IS staff which caused
>    periodic NFS I/O errors. The tweak appears to have been rolled
>    back, and the stale-lockfile plague has subsided. At no point have
>    we (to my knowledge) lost data as the result of using CVS over NFS.


NFS has a tendency to corrupt large files by writing blocks of 
zeroes when there are communications errors.  CVS (actually RCS)
doesn't checksum its repositories, and the version most frequently
used at the top of the tree is the only complete version in the 
repository, so errors can go undetected until some time in the 
far-flung future when you want to go back and get some customers 
old version of the source and some backward delta midway through
the history has gotten munged.

I wouldn't recommend it.

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