Lazyweb: Educate me on NFS

[prog]

Google and Wikipedia aren't coming through for me on this one:

Imagine that we have a utility which, in the course of its duties, reads and writes files to a file system.

What sorts of behaviors would make it not NFS-safe? I thought NFS was totally transparent to man and beast alike, but perhaps this is not quite so?

Comments

[novalis.livejournal.com]

I don't know much about NFS, but I recall something about file locking being a bit weird on NFS. This will depend on (a) your version of NFS, (b) the particular technique you use (fcntl, flock, O_EXCL/hard links), and (c) the particular version of the particular kernel you are using.

[ubiquity.livejournal.com]

The only case I know of is if something else is attempting to write to that same file at the same time.