Another case for CIFS and ZFS?

Microsoft has released kb/946676, detailing a problem with Windows Home Server shared folders.

When you use certain programs to edit files on a home computer that uses Windows Home Server, the files may become corrupted when you save them to the home server.

The article warns about certain applications that are not supported with shared folders. Users should copy their files to local storage before opening them with any of the suspect applications.

That basically halves the functionality of WHS, which is being touted as a NAS/backup appliance.


I wonder though, whether the problem described here is inherent to the way windows applications use their datafiles. The typical approach I remember is that applications do live updates to the original files, after making a temporary backup file. This in contrast to the traditional unix way of life, where you first create a working copy and when done use that to replace the original.

I really should build my own home NAS based on Solaris/CIFS server and ZFS next year. Let's see what kind of budget I have...



Update: It appears to be a reliability issue under heavy load, and was hard to reproduce. I claim it would not happen with NFS. That's why NFS (and any NAS) write performance can suffer badly, if you don't have the hardware to help it along.

Links:
mswhs.com UK fansite
Computerworld article