preallocated file size

[Terry McCoy]

> Terry McCoy wrote:
> [...] 		t	he file is being created and
> > a seek ahead is being done, then the process of coping the
> > file over from the client to the server is begun.  Hence a
> > method to preallocate disk space for the new file.
> > 
> >     Why is this being done?
> >     Is there an configuration option to turn this behavior off?
> >     If it can't be turned off what location(s) in the source is this
> >     behavior being implemented.
>

 
On Thu, 3 Feb 2000, David Collier-Brown wrote:
>
> 	It appears to be client-side behavior: it doesn't
> 	happen with smbclient, so I'll assume it's an idiom
> 	used on Windows filesystems to get an early failure,
> 	thus saving the user a long wait just to find out
> 	that the copy failed...
> 

Yes you are correct, I verified this by having an NT client mount
a share on an NT file server and copy a 160MB file.  Sure enough
on the NT server the file was created and its size set to 160MB
while the copy was in progress.

Hmmm...  I wonder how they handle incomplete file transfers, but
         that's a potential problem for another day :>) 



> 	Can you tell us what the result is on the Windows side?
> 	I fear it's: "the program appeared to succeed, but the file
> 	is silently truncated if there isn't enough disk space". 
> 	That would be bad (;-)).  If it is, can you tell us what
> 	programs suffer from it?
> 

I am still looking into this, the users are using the GUI file manager
and I am not getting precise enough information about what the error
messages are.

Wondering if this is specific to NT or does Win 95/98 behave the same?


Do you know if this a client side option for NT/98/95?




--
Terry McCoy                             email:  terry at nd.edu
Sr Systems Engineer                     phone:  (219) 631-4274
Enterprise Systems Software
Office of Information Technologies
University of Notre Dame