NFS over serial link

[Samuel Lam]

In article <1139 at msa3b.UUCP>, kevin at msa3b.UUCP (Kevin P. Kleinfelter) wrote:
>The instructor says he knows of no reason why it should not work with
>a serial link. ... If it won't work, why not?

Most (all?) implementations of NFS doesn't use the UDP checksum for error
detection, and thus rely on whatever's below IP to be error-free.  In
the Ethernet and Token Ring environment this works okay because of the
relative reliability of the hardware, but on a SLIP line the chance of
a datagram getting corrupted in the middle but still arrive at the other
end is usually much higher, especially if you are using low-speed modems
without automatic error correction for the link.

So, I guess the answer is it will work most of the times, but for the
times that it doesn't work, you might not know until too late.

[ If AIX's NFS implementation actually uses the UCP checksum, then you
  can just ignore what I said above. ]

...Sam
-- 
Samuel Lam     <skl at wimsey.bc.ca> or {uunet,ubc-cs}!wimsey.bc.ca!skl