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+
+The NFS client
+==============
+
+The NFS version 2 protocol was first documented in RFC1094 (March 1989).
+Since then two more major releases of NFS have been published, with NFSv3
+being documented in RFC1813 (June 1995), and NFSv4 in RFC3530 (April
+2003).
+
+The Linux NFS client currently supports all the above published versions,
+and work is in progress on adding support for minor version 1 of the NFSv4
+protocol.
+
+The purpose of this document is to provide information on some of the
+upcall interfaces that are used in order to provide the NFS client with
+some of the information that it requires in order to fully comply with
+the NFS spec.
+
+The DNS resolver
+================
+
+NFSv4 allows for one server to refer the NFS client to data that has been
+migrated onto another server by means of the special "fs_locations"
+attribute. See
+        http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3530#section-6
+and
+        http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-nfsv4-referrals-00
+
+The fs_locations information can take the form of either an ip address and
+a path, or a DNS hostname and a path. The latter requires the NFS client to
+do a DNS lookup in order to mount the new volume, and hence the need for an
+upcall to allow userland to provide this service.
+
+Assuming that the user has the 'rpc_pipefs' filesystem mounted in the usual
+/var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs, the upcall consists of the following steps:
+
+   (1) The process checks the dns_resolve cache to see if it contains a
+       valid entry. If so, it returns that entry and exits.
+
+   (2) If no valid entry exists, the helper script '/sbin/nfs_cache_getent'
+       (may be changed using the 'nfs.cache_getent' kernel boot parameter)
+       is run, with two arguments:
+                - the cache name, "dns_resolve"
+                - the hostname to resolve
+
+   (3) After looking up the corresponding ip address, the helper script
+       writes the result into the rpc_pipefs pseudo-file
+       '/var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs/cache/dns_resolve/channel'
+       in the following (text) format:
+
+                "<ip address> <hostname> <ttl>\n"
+
+       Where <ip address> is in the usual IPv4 (123.456.78.90) or IPv6
+       (ffee:ddcc:bbaa:9988:7766:5544:3322:1100, ffee::1100, ...) format.
+       <hostname> is identical to the second argument of the helper
+       script, and <ttl> is the 'time to live' of this cache entry (in
+       units of seconds).
+
+       Note: If <ip address> is invalid, say the string "0", then a negative
+       entry is created, which will cause the kernel to treat the hostname
+       as having no valid DNS translation.
+
+
+
+
+A basic sample /sbin/nfs_cache_getent
+=====================================
+
+#!/bin/bash
+#
+ttl=600
+#
+cut=/usr/bin/cut
+getent=/usr/bin/getent
+rpc_pipefs=/var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs
+#
+die()
+{
+        echo "Usage: $0 cache_name entry_name"
+        exit 1
+}
+
+[ $# -lt 2 ] && die
+cachename="$1"
+cache_path=${rpc_pipefs}/cache/${cachename}/channel
+
+case "${cachename}" in
+        dns_resolve)
+                name="$2"
+                result="$(${getent} hosts ${name} | ${cut} -f1 -d\ )"
+                [ -z "${result}" ] && result="0"
+                ;;
+        *)
+                die
+                ;;
+esac
+echo "${result} ${name} ${ttl}" >${cache_path}
+