Named Pipes across NFS?

[Tim Tsai]

barmar at think.com (Barry Margolin) writes:
>In article <it1.672572450 at Isis.MsState.Edu> it1 at Isis.MsState.Edu (Tim Tsai) writes:
>>  In my case, I have my .plan set up as a named pipe and a daemon that
>>searches the process table for the finger process when awaken.  This
>>will only catch fingerers from the local host, which was fine, but if a
>>NFS-mounted station tries to read my .plan, it blocks, and causes
>>erratic behavior with the daemon until .plan is read from the original
>>host.
>I see.  This is a difficult problem to solve, unless you can arrange to run
>your daemon on every system that mounts your home directory.

  We have at least 7 machines mounting the users' file systems, which
makes that VERY impractical.  Not to mention that my account will
probably be yanked if I decide to do something like that.. :-)

>Even if named pipes worked across NFS, what would you expect the result of
>this to be?  How would you find the fingerer in the process table when the
>fingerer is on a different system?

  Normally I just put "can't locate the fingerer" on the log file, but I
thought about parsing netstat, and then start a remote shell on the
machines that I do have access to..  It was just an interesting project
to play with, not to get any work done or anything..  The best solution
would be to modify fingerd, but that's impossible without root access.

>--
>Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

>barmar at think.com
>{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar

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