bugs (features) in vstafs?

After several years of being too busy to do anything but work, I've
finally gotten a reprieve and decided to take a look at vsta again.
1.6.1 is very nice and other than some stupid end of file mangling by
winzip installed without any major problems. Booting with grub is also
very cool.

While playing around with the vstafs I discovered what I consider a
bug. If I try to 'tar xvf' any of the source archives into a vstafs
filesystem, I get a ton of error messages about not being able to set
mtime and atime.

I dug through the vstafs code and found in stat.c where it will allow
mtime to be set, but no other stat. Since there isn't an atime stat for
vstafs files I added some code to just ignore the request instead of
returning an error (a NOP in effect). That fixed the tar problem and I
was able to unpack everything into the vstafs filesystem.

I'm wondering if this behavior is what was intended?

Second, I discovered, after accidently removing chmod permissions from a
directory, that I couldn't change it's acc list, even though I owned the
file. I dug through the stat.c code some more and discovered where it
was specifically allowing the owner of a file to do things even if the
permissions didn't allow it. However, that didn't seem to make any
difference, and after some debugging discovered that it was never making
it to the stat write routine. I then dug some more and found that the
open routine was also checking permissions and was the one blocking my
request. I added the same extra check to open and then I was able to
update the acc list.

I made the changes on my machine at home, so I don't have the source to
diff right now. I'll send out the diff's tonight or tomorrow.

Finally, I thought I would mention that I'm running vsta on a Syquest
SPARQ 1G removable drive (it's the only IDE drive in my system). It
works fine. I have grub installed in the bootblock and the system boots
from it just fine. It's not the worlds fastest drive (significantly
slower than my barracuda), but it's livable. I'm thinking about
stopping by Fry's to pick up one of their dirt cheap 6G IDE drives to
make things go a little faster, but it's cool that it works and is a
good way to have a dedicated vsta drive if you can't spare a drive in
your system.

++Brett;
Received on Fri Apr 17 13:54:38 1998