We are finding an increasing number of user files (several thousand files at present) with bizarre dates, eg
-rwx--x--x 1 rfx3 ug93 49 Dec 27 1931 /usr/fsa/ug93/rfx3/letter-home -rwx--x--x 1 socx12 socs 460 Jul 22 1948 /usr/fsa/extn/socx12/nov2nd
The dates display mainly in the 1930s although there are a few around the year 2009! These files seem to have been created over CIFS from PCs running Windows 95.
It becomes a real problem if you run Solaris 7 which seems to have numerous bugs in the area of NFS file dates. It won't read, write or delete these files - it says "Value too large for user buffer". It's all related to 64-bit vs 32-bit Solaris and whether dates are signed or unsigned. SGI systems and older Solaris systems don't have the problem.
Having talked to Sun I tried patching the kernel variable nfs_32_time_ok to be 0xffffffff which appears to fix it, except it breaks other things like the utime system call.
The best option at present seem to be to run a weekly script on a non-solaris 7 system to find the bad files and "touch" them.
Any ideas anyone?
------------------------------------------------------ Dave Atkin, Head of Technical Services Computing Service, University of York, YORK YO10 5DD Phone: +44-1904-433804 (ddi) Fax: +44-1904-433740 Email: D.Atkin@york.ac.uk ------------------------------------------------------