This e-mail is a follow-up to a previous e-mail describing a flaw in Microsoft's SMB Redirector (mrxsmb.sys) that could have serious implications for OpenAFS users.
http://lists.openafs.org/pipermail/openafs-info/2009-April/031174.html >From January to April of this year I have been working with Microsoft to resolve a series of issues between Microsoft's SMB Redirector and OpenAFS. In the simplest of terms Windows has for many years had a race condition in the mrxsmb.sys code which was fairly recently exposed. The race condition would lead to a deadlock whose symptoms could not be distinguished from the OpenAFS Client Service failing to respond. Microsoft has now pushed out the fixes to all of their currently supported platforms: Windows XP (32-bit) SP2 and SP3 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971421 Windows 2003 (32-bit and 64-bit) and XP64 SP2 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969289 Windows Vista and 2008 installed as part of SP2 In addition to fixing the race condition and the deadlock Microsoft also addressed one of the biggest issues that OpenAFS has suffered from on the Microsoft Windows desktop: The fixed client side timeout in the SMB redirector. Up until these latest versions of the SMB redirector the client side timeout has been stuck at 45 seconds. If the SMB redirector sent a request to the \\AFS SMB Server (the OpenAFS cache manager) and a response was not received within 45 seconds, the SMB redirector would assume the SMB server was broken, break the connection and send an error to the caller. It is not always possible to reply in 45 seconds. As a result, the end user experience has suffered. As part of these latest updated Microsoft added two new registry values to the SMB redirector: ExtendedSessionTimeout ServersWithExtendedSessionTimeout The 1.5.60 (and later) versions of OpenAFS for Windows will automatically create these values. The extended session timeout is set to 10 minutes and the name "AFS" is added to the server list. With these changes the OpenAFS for Windows client no longer has to worry about the SMB redirector canceling requests that are still being processed. If you are a user of OpenAFS for Windows or manage packages for your users, please upgrade to 1.5.60 and either install the hot fix for XP and 2003 or SP2 for Vista and 2008 depending on your operating system platform. Thank you. Jeffrey Altman _______________________________________________ OpenAFS-info mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/openafs-info
