Softupdates Question

[Norbert Koch]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Alex de Kruijff
> Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 4:57 PM
> To: Scott Sipe
> Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: Softupdates Question
> 
> 
> On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 03:40:41PM -0400, Scott Sipe wrote:
> > 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > At work we're running some rather old accounting software that tells  
> > us to disable oplocks and all caheing on our file server (and our  
> > clients)--Samba/FreeBSD isn't officially supported (the only  
> > platforms that are are Windows Server and Novell--yes, it's old) but  
> > we've been running fine on this configuration.
> > 
> > The software is sensitive to data caching issues etc, and corruption  
> > is occasionally an issue.
> > 
> > I have all oplocks disabled for the share in samba, and at the moment  
> > I have softupdates disabled on the accounting software mount.
> > 
> > My question is, does activating softupdates add any risk of data  
> > loss? My guess is no, but I've wanted to play it safe. Our other  
> > samba shares all have softupdates enabled and do fine, and speed is  
> > becoming somewhat of an issue.
> 
> No there's no risk of data loss. 

Yes, there is!
Softupdates guarantees a consistent state of meta data. But there
is a chance of losing a lot of recent file data changes.
An other problem is, that Softupdates cannot know how much data
is still in the hard disk's cache and not yet written back.

I think it cannot easyly be answered, if it is better in this
special configuration to run with or w/o Softupdates.

Norbert