RFS vs. NFS

Robert Viduya robert at pyr.gatech.EDU
Sun Mar 27 02:40:22 AEST 1988


>fdr at ksr.UUCP (Franklin Reynolds) (fdr at ksr.UUCP, <275 at ksr.UUCP>):
> ...          All this stuff about stateless file sytems being
> nice and besides stateful file systems are hard is hooey. If other
> people can do it, then Sun should be able to.

Hear, hear.  NFS strikes me as being something that was designed to be
easier for programmers to implement AT THE EXPENSE OF THE USERS.  The
attitude of the proponents of state-less-ness back this up.  Most, if
not all of thier pro (as opposed to con) arguments for NFS are technical
in nature and are things that only a developer would have to deal with.
The user gets short-changed by occasionally having to be aware that his
file exists on a remote machine.

Having used both RFS and NFS, I, and a number of other people around
here much prefer RFS for it's transparency.  None of the semantics of
Unix files are lost.  Unfortunately, it's limited degree of availability
has forced us into the NFS world.

			robert
-- 
Robert Viduya						  robert at pyr.gatech.edu
Office of Computing Services
Georgia Institute of Technology					 (404) 894-6296
Atlanta, Georgia	30332-0275



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