I'm on a customer service low of late. Valve/Steam and my ex-credit card company rank down there. (My ex-credit card company decided my card was stolen while I was on a business trip. They would not let me charge the tank of gas or my rental car. When I canceled my card, they said I was a great customer and what would it take to change my mind. I said where was that attitude when I needed you?)

So it is always a joy to order something from NewEgg.com. I had googled a 4 USB port KVM and found it for $99. I added it to my cart and then went to NewEgg.com. They had it for $74 and I didn't have to mail off a rebate form. But what really sold it is their policy of putting up pictures of everything in the box. So I could see it really did have cables with it. I could see what they looked like and I could realize any plan of using my old VGA connectors from a previous KVM were ill advised.

I ordered from NewEgg.com, not because of the price break, but because I knew I could count on their customer service.

I've slammed the Linux NFSv4 implementation before for not having the same namespace as NFSv3. I.e., it used the 'fsid=0' hack to export the root of the v4 namespace and thus that path may not be the same as '/'.

Well, over on the nfsv4 <at> linux-nfs.org mailing list, Steve just announced a prototype which fixes that problem! And the crowd goes wild!

The following patch series gives rpc.mountd the ability to allocate
a dynamic pseudo root, so the 'fsid=0' export option is no longer 
required. This allows v2, v3 and v4 clients mounts without any 
changes to the server's exports list.

One anomaly of the Linux NFS server is that it requires a pseudo root
to be defined. Currently the only way a pseudo root can be defined is by 
setting the fsid to zero (i.e. fsid=0). So if we wanted to make v4
the default mounting version and have things just work like v2/v3
all of the existing exports configurations would have to change 
(i.e. a 'fsid=0' would have to be added) to support a v4 mounts,
which, imho, is unacceptable. So this patch series address
this problem.

I think this might also mark the first major piece of work on the Linux NFSv4 code to come from some place other than CITI. I might be wrong, but I think this is a sign of the maturity of code.