(was slashes, now NFS devices)

Peter da Silva peter at ficc.ferranti.com
Thu Mar 7 00:52:21 AEST 1991


In article <FWP1.91Feb23160240 at Jester.CC.MsState.Edu> fwp1 at CC.MsState.Edu (Frank Peters) writes:
> > If you can access remote files, why can't you access remote devices using
> > the same mechanism? Under RFS, special files are interpreted by the server.

> You ignore (or aren't aware of) two important differences between RFS
> and NFS that make this impractical.

Well, one...

> 1. NFS is designed to be operating system independant while RFS
>    assumes UNIX on both ends of the connection.

OpenNET lets you do things like accessing a named pipe from DOS. If
anything operating system independence would seem to imply that file
semantics should be interpreted in the server.

> 2. This is probably most important.  NFS is stateless.

This is the killer. I think it would be reasonable to relax statelessness
for devices, though.
-- 
Peter da Silva.  `-_-'  peter at ferranti.com
+1 713 274 5180.  'U`  "Have you hugged your wolf today?"



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