Re: Does nautilus hang if an NFS server is unreachable?

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Peter,

On Tue, 2003-02-25 at 17:04, Peter O'Shea wrote:
> > 	They are already in separate threads. The problem is - that due to the
> > Unix API, it's not possible to know that a file is on a remote server -
> > without doing a blocking stat that kills the thread.

> Isn't it possible to get a good idea if the file is on a remote server,
> by looking at the mnttab (mtab in Linux, I think)?  If a file is located
> on a mount point that has a server name (other than the local) in front
> of it in the table, it's remote.  Then before checking the file
> directly, you could ping the server and see if it's answering?

	There's little point pinging the server; the only interesting thing to
do to NFS stuff is to isolate it into its own thread-pool so other
things can carry on happening when it inevitably blocks indefinately.

	The problem with the scheme is really symbolic links - and the fact
that you'd have to traverse all the way up 'from the bottom' of any
path, statting - or testing to see what FS it was on, unwinding links as
you go - it's not the most efficient option. Having said that - it could
most likely be heavily cached in user-land so - possibly worth
investigating - go for it ! :-)

	Of course - the kernel knows - so a non-blocking 'getfs(path)' syscall
would be rather nice, but ...

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot