Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!husc6!rice!sun-spots-request
From: apctrc!zmls04@uunet.uu.net (Martin L. Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun
Subject: Need to find name of server which owns a file
Keywords: Software
Message-ID: <4082@kalliope.rice.edu>
Date: 22 Jun 89 17:40:48 GMT
Sender: usenet@rice.edu
Organization: Sun-Spots
Lines: 24
Approved: Sun-Spots@rice.edu
X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 8, Issue 47, message 10 of 15

We are building some network program-maintenance tools.  We need a way to
associate a unique label with each file in the network (preferably, with
every file in the universe).  From our (fairly ignorant) point of view, we
think we would have what we want if we knew how to generate, given a
pathname on some node, a string of the form

	(server-node-id):(true-pathname-on-server).

This is based on our understanding that every node in the galaxy has a
unique id (associated with its network address) and that every file in the
galaxy has a server on which it resides and a `true' physical path on some
device owned by the server.  Our problems are:

	(1) we aren't 100% sure this is correct.  can anyone tell us?
	(2) even if it's correct, we don't know how to find the desired
	string in a reasonable way.  We haven't been able to find out
	enough about our OS (Sun 4.0) to know what to do.  In particular,
	statfs(2) doesn't seem to tell us what we want.  Does anyone know
	how to generate such a string?  It <<must>> be possible;
	presumably the OS does it all the time.

Festering in ignorance, we remain
	Yrs. Sincerely,
		etc,etc.