NFS vs. RFS

[Jim Reid]

In article <5488 at brl-smoke.ARPA> Gwyn at BRL.ARPA writes:
>This NFS-vs.-RFS discussion reminds me of a question I wanted to ask:
>
>When we upgraded our Gould PowerNode 60x0/90x0 systems to UTX/32
>Release 2.0, which incorporated NFS support, I was dismayed to
>discover that a perfectly ordinary program compiled in the BSD
>environment had died in the middle of what appears to be a large
>amount of Yellow-Pages support code dragged in from the C library.
>This was a total surprise to me, as the UNIX System V emulation
>that I provide doesn't include any of this stuff, nor will it!
>
>My question is, is this yp_* library crap really necessary for NFS?

No. Yellow Pages and NFS are independant of each other and you can use
one without the other. You get Yellow Pages to "help" administer the
local network - it just lets YP hosts keep track of changes to files
like /etc/passwd, /etc/hosts and so on without having the system admin.
update every copy of these files on each host every time they change.

You can argue the case either way for having your SysV environment contain
the YP code (and the underlying SUN XDR and RPC routines). However if it's
possible that your SysV lookup routines will read files containing YP
information, you should ensure the SysV code won't blow up if it gets YP
entries instead of the usually expected data even if it won't make use of
the YP routines.

What scunnered (a good Scottish word!) me about YP was that it added about
18Kbytes - yes, 18Kbytes - to things like the password lookup routines.
This was because getpwent() & friends now have to parse YP formats and
perhaps make remote procedure calls, serialising and deserialising data
using the XDR routines, as well as get conventional password entries.

I could have taken the YP code out, but saving disk space is less important
to me than wasting time editing umpteen password files.

		Jim

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