Re: Problem with "bogus date" on NFS

On May 12, 2010, at 6:55 AM, Andreas Schwarz wrote:

>
> Hi,
>
> I have a strange problem with a working copy on a NFS mount. Checking
> out works fine, but whenever I try to svn stat/info/up a certain
> directory, I get the message
> svn: Error at entry 6 in entries file for 'cfg':
> svn: Bogus date
> I traced it down to an empty file in this directory that has a weird
> "text last changed" date in the entries file:
> 1949-12-07T10:27:14.-840919Z
> This date is different (random) each time I make a new checkout on the
> NFS mount. But everything is fine when I check out the repository on a
> local disk.
>
> I tried removing, committing and re-adding the offending file, but that
> doesn't fix the problem.
>
> Any ideas what is going on there?

Are you by any chance using NFSv4, and mounting this filesystem from a Solaris NFS server? I encountered the same issue a few months ago. It appears to only happen with zero-length files, because as soon as data is written to the file the timestamp gets fixed. It's actually a Solaris bug:
http://bugs.opensolaris.org/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6854659

One workaround is to use NFSv3. Another is to put some data in the zero-length file.

The fix is in snv_126, which means it should be fixed in the next version of OpenSolaris that comes out (the one that was supposed to be 2010.03, before the Oracle merger delayed everything.)

-- 
David Brodbeck
System Administrator, Linguistics
University of Washington