Syncs done while browsing

All browsing in Xinet is handled by the listdir program. On a database-enabled volume, listdir gets the list of items to display from the database. Additionally, listdir makes a check on the directory being browsed to verify that the contents displayed are up to date in the database.

When listdir is run from a browser on a directory, it does two things:

1.	Displays the items listed in the database as being within the directory.

2.	Checks that the database matches the file system for this directory.

More precisely, the check in step 2 looks for a directory modification time discrepancy. Full details of such discrepancies can be found in Syncs: to -delnorm or not to -delnorm. If a discrepancy is found, listdir will run a sync on that directory and post an event to the webdblog file. From there, dblogd will put the changes into the database. Note that the sync does not descend through any subdirectories. Essentially, this is a sync without a -delnorm.

Assuming that there is a discrepancy and that a sync is done on the directory, note that the effects of the sync will not be seen until the browser is refreshed. That’s because step one (the display) happens first. To see the changes made by step two (if any), one has to refresh the browser.

When a directory is out of date, a comment is written to the venture.log file that looks like this:

[Fri Apr 11 11:28:45]Warning: db was out of sync for [/export/Testing/kiwi/Inner sanctum], resyncing...

One last note: listdir only checks from directory modification times, not file modification times. By contrast, syncvoltodb(8) checks for both directories’ and files’ modification times. This results in slight differences in the “cover up” case that is detailed in the following topic: Synchronizations run by listdir on the directory being displayed..