Subject: Re: file_id

From: Jim Rees <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2002 12:49:23 -0500

When I pushed for adding a unique file identifier to the protocol, I was
told there were some servers that would be unable to provide this, because
all they have is the file name.  These servers hash the name to get the file
handle.  If the file is renamed, the handle becomes stale, and the client
must re-open.

I don't know which servers these would be, but I would guess they come from
Microsoft.

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From: "Eric Sedlar" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 11:07:25 -0800

I can't speak for Microsoft.  Our filesystem can provide a unique
identifier,
but we use the GUID algorithm to create a 16-byte ID so that we don't have
to lock access to some shared resource to get an integer from a sequence.
It
would be nice if NFS v4 clients could deal with a varying-width binary ID
as far as we are concerned.