On 14 November, I wrote in toasters about ... [...]

The problem is that sometimes ".snapshot" isn't visible to readdir() *even* in mount point directories. This seems to happen only in directories with more than one 4K block (it's notable that "ls -f" shows .snapshot coming after the first block's worth in such directories, if it shows up at all), and rather rarely even then (2 out of over 150 user home directories of >4K that I looked at today), but as long as the directory isn't tinkered with the state remains the same.

I've observed this with several OnTap 5.2.x & 5.3.x releases, and several different Solaris releases as clients. It *could* be an NFS client implementation problem, I suppose, but I don't think I believe that.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Thanks to Guy Harris at NetApp this has now been nailed down. It turns out to be a long-standing bug, not yet fixed in any released version of DOT. The problem is that if an NFS client does a READDIRPLUS *starting* at what should be the .snapshot entry (which is indeed interposed between the first and second block) then it gets left out of the results returned.

The entry in Bugs Online is 33454, although it's a bit sparse on details at the moment!

Chris Thompson University of Cambridge Computing Service, Email: cet1@ucs.cam.ac.uk New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG, Phone: +44 1223 334715 United Kingdom.