Re: [Nautilus-list] getting Nautilus to not look into /afs

[Larry Stone <lcs MIT EDU>]

I've observed the same problem with nautilus aggressively scanning the
/afs hierarchy, which gets directory-walking threads bogged down waiting
for responses from every AFS site on the globe.  It's a known pitfall
in the design of AFS and the usual approach is to train applications
to "don't do that".  Given the transparency of network filesystems in
general, it is usually a mistake to assume it is cheap to stat() every
file in the entire hierarchy.

For my testing of nautilus in our environment on Solaris, I crudely
hacked a couple of functions to skip over any path or URI starting
in /afs, or symlinked to something under /afs:

components/tree/nautilus-tree-view.c:  reload_model_node_recursive
libnautilus-extensions/nautilus-directory-async.c:  start_monitoring_file_list

This cured the symptom but it's not anything like a clean fix.

Should this be built into a special VFS module for AFS, and if so could
the "file" module be trained to direct any paths under /afs into that
module?  AFS directories also handle Unix file protection modes a bit
differently, which has caused some problems in the past, so perhaps that
could also be fixed at the VFS layer.

I haven't found any design (or other) documentation on gnome-vfs, but with
some help and guidance I'd be happy to write the code.

    -- Larry