* Nathan Parrish <ndparrish@yahoo.com> [010125 13:19] wrote:
> knowing NFS in general far better than *BSD in specific, I would guess the best
> thing to do (if you suspect server/client communication anomaly) is to grab a
> snoop/tcpdump of the failure.  I'm trying to think of a clever way to cause the
> failure immediately, so you're not tracing 4GB of writes... mebbe dd's
> seek/skip?  or just append to the existing 4GB file.
> 
> also, what command are you using on the bsd's to write the 4GB file?  I've
> definitely seen issues with VLF-capable OS's failing to write past 2/4GB due to
> VLF-incapable utilities.  (on a related note, is there a need for
> vlfread()/vlfwrite() in the BSD's, or is VLF support native in the read/write
> calls?  

It has to do with the vm system casting values into 32bit variables,
it's been a long time since I looked at this, if I can find it again
I might be able to do something about it.

To answer your question about VLF (which I had to guess at) assuming
you mean Very Large Files:

1) yes some tools break on them, I don't have a list handy.
2) BSD has had native VLF support since 4.4-BSD.  (off_t is 64bit)

-- 
-Alfred Perlstein - [bright@wintelcom.net|alfred@freebsd.org]
"I have the heart of a child; I keep it in a jar on my desk."