[vdr] Re: cSafeFile and clusternfs

[Luca Olivetti <luca@ventoso.org>]

Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
> Luca Olivetti wrote:
>
> > I'm testing what is going to be my vdr machine. It's a diskless pc which
> > boots with etherboot and uses nfs for its filesystems (currently running
> > vdr-1.3.8 with the streamdev-server plugin, the display is done on
> > another computer with streamdev-client).
> > The nfs server is running clusternfs (http://clusternfs.sourceforge.net,
> > basically because it's the easiest option to setup a diskless machine
> > with mandrake). The "problem" (actually a feature) is that clusternfs
> > maps files with "$" in the name in a special way depending on the client
> > that reads/writes it (so you can have different files with the same name
> > for different clients).
> > After a while I noticed I had a lot of files with strange names in the
> > video directory (various copies of channels.conf, epg.data, setup.conf
> > with funny and random suffixes). Besides, many times the "real" files
> > (channels.conf, setup.conf) where corrupted (e.g, some epg data appended
> > to channel.conf and/or to setup.conf).
> > I changed the suffix for the tempFile in cSafeFile constructor from
> > "$$$" (a mapping that shouldn't be used anyway by clusternfs) to "###".
> > After variuos hours with vdr running after the change I don't have funny
> > filenames anymore (one it's still there though: channels.conf00000de?),
> > but there's still epg data appended at the end of channels.conf and
> > setup.conf.
> >
> > Is it simply a clusternfs bug? Any other idea?
>
> I don't think that it is a good idea of a file system to mess around
> with file names in that way.
Oh, it is, so you can export the same filesystem to a bunch of machines 
and just make a handful of personalized configuration files. Pity that 
it doesn't work.

> I'd call it a bug of 'clusternfs'.
I'd say you're right: after trying unfs3, http://unfs3.sourceforge.net, 
 with which I got rid of the funny names but not of epg garbage 
appended to channels.conf and setup.conf, I managed to setup everything 
with the kernel nfs server and the problems are gone. Pity that is not 
as easy to setup as clusternfs/unfs3. Maybe I'll try the mixed approach 
described in 
http://www.pci.uni-heidelberg.de/tc/usr/bernd/downloads/nfs-root-howto/diskless-nfs-howto.txt 

Or simply put a disk in the computer running vdr, since I now realized 
that my old pentium 100, although completely silent, has not enough 
horsepower to drive the dxr3 plugin[*], and with a more powerful 
computer disk noise isn't a major concern :-(

[*] I just received a dxr3, up until now I've been testing with the 
streamdev-server and, save for a few channels, the pentium 100 worked 
well enough.

Bye
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