Hi Phil,
>
> I have found some problems with pvfs2-viewdist, however, that I don't
> have any patches for.  The issue is that it is using extended attributes
> to access the data that it needs.  The problem with this approach is
> that it is retrieving distribution and handle information by reading it
> directly out of the server's collection, bypassing any network encoding.
>   Since the client doesn't really know how the server wrote this data,
> it may not be able to interpret it correctly.

Yup. This is a problem indeed. Could we fix it the same way acl's are
stored by encoding them? But this will break existing storage spaces
although I suppose that is less of an issue especially now that we are
moving to newer storage formats..

>
> For example, pvfs2-viewdist does not work for me when I use a 32bit
> client to look at a file system hosted on 64bit servers.  I suspect that
> the problem would be more severe if the endian-ness where inverted.
yup.
>
> There is an interface for getting the list of handles (properly
> en/decoded) with PVFS_mgmt_get_dfile_array() that might work better for
> that portion of the utility.  I'm not sure about the distribution
> information.

Hmm.. I was only looking at the system interfaces unfortunately. I didn't
realize that mgmt interfaces also exist :)

>
> debugging, but we might want to think about how it should get the
> information that it uses.

Agreed
Thanks,
Murali
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