Hello Peter,

>does venus cache whole files only?

Yes.  By doing this you get disconnected operation and direct
local disk operations for read and write.

>Is there a way to change this behavior?

No.  This was a design decision.

>What happens when handling files larger than the local cache size?

Venus won't get a file from a server that is larger than the available
cache.  You can open a new file and then write more data than the 
"available" cache size (assuming you do really have that much local 
disk space available) and when the file is closed, venus won't put
anything else in the cache until there is "available" space again.
That means that something must be thrown out of the cache.

>And while I'm posting anyway - what is the status of coda support in FreeBSD 
>5.1? Is it working? If so, it is up to the 6.0.1 level (with realms etc)?

To my knowledge, there is a set of patches available for FreeBSD that bring
the kernel module up to Coda 6.  They were originally done on FreeBSD 4.6.
I believe someone has them working on some FreeBSD 5.? version.

--Phil

-- 
Phil Nelson                       NetBSD: http://www.netbsd.org
e-mail: phil@cs.wwu.edu           Coda: http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu
http://cs.wwu.edu/faculty/nelson