RFS vs. NFS

[Barry Margolin]

In article <676 at leah.Albany.Edu> rmb384 at leah.Albany.Edu (Robert Bownes) writes:
>	NFS was designed to be OS independant. If I may be so bold as to quote 
>from the paper originally written about NFS, it is intended for
>"A heterogeneous OS environment" and "Should be easily extensible, should
>only implement protocol not dependant on the OS".

While NFS is an admirable protocol, it falls a bit short in totally
reaching those goals.  For example, for most things NFS doesn't
require the client machine to parse the server's pathnames, so instead
the client traverses the client's hierarchy.  However, the operation
that reads a symbolic link returns a pathname string in the server's
format.

Chris Lindblad, of the MIT AI Lab, and Mark Son-Bell, of International
Lisp Associates, the authors of ILA-NFS, an implementation of NFS for
Symbolics Lisp Machines, wrote a paper describing the OS-independence
issues they encountered while writing it.  I'm not sure whether it has
been published (they include it in their user manual);
CJL at REAGAN.AI.MIT.EDU should be able to tell you how to get a copy (I
hope he doesn't mind me dropping his name without permission).

Barry Margolin
Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar at think.com
uunet!think!barmar