[9fans] Factotum discrepancy

[9fans] Factotum discrepancy

[Brian L. Stuart]

There appears to be a disagreement between the
factotum man page and its actual behavior regarding
the -a option.  In the man page, the wording:

-a   supplies the address of the authentication server to
     use.  Without this option, it will attempt to find an
     authentication server by querying the connection
     server, the file <mtpt>/ndb, and finally the network
     database in /lib/ndb.

makes it sound like the -a option takes precedence
over cs and ndb.  But the code for _autdial() in
util.c looks for cs first and if it's there, the
-a option is ignored.  (In p9p, -a seems to be ignored
altogether.)

Which way should it be?  I'd prefer if -a took precedence,
but if the existing behavior is really what's wanted,
then I suggest we change the man page so it's more clear
that's what's happening.

BLS

Re: [9fans] Factotum discrepancy

[erik quanstrom]

> makes it sound like the -a option takes precedence
> over cs and ndb.  But the code for _autdial() in
> util.c looks for cs first and if it's there, the
> -a option is ignored.  (In p9p, -a seems to be ignored
> altogether.)
>
> Which way should it be?  I'd prefer if -a took precedence,
> but if the existing behavior is really what's wanted,
> then I suggest we change the man page so it's more clear
> that's what's happening.

it seems like this code is being very sly.
i think the problem the code is working around
is that if you first connect to the local machine
and later want to mount sources, you will fail
since the auth server you've specified in -a won't
auth sources.  (at least that's how i read the comment,
if i squint a bit.)

also, if you were to smarten up -a to take an
authdom / authserver pair, e.g. -a coraid.com!tyty.coraid.com
it could still cause trouble if ndb were updated
while you were running  one would expect cs to
fix things up, but it wouldn't.

is this a problem with a 9vx setup?  perhaps
getting cs looking at the right data is the real
problem?

- erik