On Wed, 20 May 2009, Juli Mallett wrote:
> When client ids have been run out of, does that put something into a
> dangerous state (insecure or crash-prone)? Isn't it better to let the
> administrator make the decision of when to reboot the machine?
>
Well, first off, this will "never" happen in practice. the clientid
generator is a 32bit unsigned, which means it will wrap around in 13.6
years if there is an average rate of 10 new clientids/sec. Since a new
clientid only typically happens once per mount (some clients might even
do less), it seems highly unlikely that an "average rate of 10/sec"
could happen even on the busiest server with clients doing short term
mounts. (There was talk of a client inside a web browser, but I don't
know that it has ever been written.)
When the 32bit # wraps around, rebooting would be the only solution,
since re-issuing the same clientid is verboten by the RFC.
If it was something I will see happen in my lifetime, I would be more
concerned about it.
The only reason I put it in is so no one can argue I can violate the RFC.
Have fun, rick