TID100767 (IABJ6820) - NLM: DFS Write, NetWare Read Problems

From Developer Community

Describes a potential problem when expanding a file using DFS.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

Novell Developer Support SDK Update, 21 August 1996
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Platform: NLM/DFS applications

Issue:

When a DFS file is expanded it will of course acquire free disk blocks. If these
newly acquired disk blocks happen to be in the NetWare OS file system cache, DFS
does nothing to remove them from the cache. Therefore, if the application writes to
these new blocks, closes the file, and then re-opens the file under the NetWare file
system, those blocks may still be in the cache, and they would still contain the
data that was in them before they were assigned to the DFS file. When this happens
the application can then read the file and get the old copy of the data. Note that
this problem has been in DFS since 3.X and continues through NetWare 4.11.

Work-around:

A simple way for the application to make the problem go away is to open the file in
DFS mode and then close it before opening it in normal NetWare mode. This has been
verified to fix the problem.

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