Need help nfs mounting from an Apollo.

[Keith Rich]

lin at sixmile.INEL.GOV (Linn Hower)
writes:

>   Help!  I am trying to mount an exported filesystem from an Apollo
> DN10000, SR10.3 on a RISC/6000 320 V3.1.  I am stuck with filesystem
> names on the apollo like //einstein/u1.  Thats a double slash.
> When I try 'mount einstein://einstein/u1 /mnt', I get:

> mount: access denied for einstein:/einstein/u1
> mount: giving up on:
>         einstein:/einstein/u1

> The AIX mount has dropped the the first slash.  How can I get it to
> stop doing this?

And wross at caen.engin.umich.edu (Wendy Ross)
writes:

> We ran into this problem trying to mount our apollo ring as well.  In fact,
> I felt rather funny when my first question to AIX defect support was:
> "How much do you know about the Apollo file system"?  Rumor has it that IBM 
> had only one apollo with which to test NFS, therefore the "/" and "//" levels 
> were the same to them.
> [[very good explanation of what to do]]

And system at alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca (System Admin (Mike Peterson))
writes:

> As far as I know, you can not mount the Apollo // level on AIX
> (we have one too, and tried for a few days to trick it - first using
> smit, then editing the NFS files manually). The problem is that on
> most UNIX systems, 2 (or more) slashes in a pathname are condensed to a
> single slash - I also believe this is required by POSIX (help me
> someone!), which is why the Apollo // stuff won't be in OSF (and will
> never be unless HP adds it specially for Domain/OS compatability).

I'd simply like to add an explanation that may help people in thinking
about this.  It is true that Unix (in general) treats a double slash the
same as a single slash either at the beginning of a filename or in the
middle of a filename.  However, NFS is defined as a standard (by Sun),
and it is NOT defined in terms of Unix.  In fact, NFS is supposed to
work with non-Unix systems and there are cases where it does.  So, this
issue "shouldn't" have anything to do with OSF, Apollo, etc.

The mount protocol is completely separated from the file access itself,
and it is supposed to simply map a general character string into an NFS
file handle.  There are no implications about the content of the string
which are set by the mount protocol.  Therefore, slashes, dots, blanks,
etc. are supposed to get interpreted by mountd (or equivalent) on the
server system.

In this case, it sounds like the mount command on AIX is not passing the
string untouched to mountd on the Apollo.  This is a violation of the
mount protocol rather than having anything to do with either NFS or the
Unix filesystem.  So, I suggest that the parties involved attempt to
apply the fix to the right place.

The double slash that Apollo wants works some several other systems
such as SunOS, PC-NFS, SCO, etc., and it "should" work from AIX.
It is a mistake to think that this is an Apollo problem.  Apollo
has enough of its own problems without trying to fix this one.

Keith Rich (keith at sscsu.stanford.edu)