How to write reliable file management code on NFS

Question

Please give me some general advises on how to write reliable file management code using NFS. How to avoid or handle ESTALE errors? Programming language doesn't really matter.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Writing robust software is best done at the highest level possible.

So rather than handling a specific type of error in a specific place in your code, ensure that if the whole operation fails in some way, it can be rolled back / ignored safely and then will automatically re-run at a later time and do the work it missed because of the error.

For example, if you are writing out some files, you could write them into a temporary directory and rename the directory after the files are written successfully; moreover, if on a subsequent run, you discover the temporary directory still there, remove it (provided you're sure there are no other processes in the infrastructure using it still).