URGENT: 1.3.72 to release this Sunday

Folks;

For those who have either not been suffering with unexplained file 
server crashes or have not been following the events on openafs-info
let me summarize what has been going on.

Since the beginning of the Fall semester a number of organizations
which deploy AFS file servers have been watching them periodically
crash.  It has been determined that the crashes are an indirect
result of a broken behavior in the Windows AFS clients (all versions
of OpenAFS since 1.0.4.)  The Windows clients had effectively
implemented a "use once and discard" policy for AFS RPC connections.
For every operation the client would destroy the existing connection
and create a new one whenever cryptall was set.  This produced an
unnecessary load on the servers.  More importantly though is the fact
that all of the rapid destruction and recreation of RPC connections
between the same set of peers has brought a serious thread safety
issue to the surface.

In all of the existing clients and  servers (IBM/Transarc and OpenAFS) 
there is a failure to properly reference count the rx_connection 
objects.  This allows an rx_connection to be destroyed by one thread
while another thread is still using it.  This problem has now been
fixed in the Windows client cache manager.  The Unix cache manager
still needs to be fixed.  Unfortunately, we have been unable to
identify where in the file server the reference counts are failing
to be applied. It is hoped that we will be able to track this down
sooner rather then later.

In the meantime, we believe it is crucial that an updated OpenAFS
client for Windows be released and that all organizations distributing
the Windows client begin the process of pushing out the update.

The 1.3.72 client will fix the use once and discard problem which
is tickling the server bug.  It will fix the local thread safety issues
so that it won't crash.  And as a side effect of fixing the bug,
the overlapped write issues from Microsoft Office and other high
performance applications has been fixed as well.

The daily builds are located at:


   /afs/athena.mit.edu/user/j/a/jaltman/Public/OpenAFS/
   \\afs\athena.mit.edu\user\j\a\jaltman\Public\OpenAFS\
   http://web.mit.edu/~jaltman/Public/OpenAFS/


Please test ASAP.

Thanks.

Jeffrey Altman