Xref: utzoo comp.protocols.nfs:278 comp.sys.mac:35000 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hoptoad!tim From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.nfs,comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: NFS and Mac IIs Message-ID: <8058@hoptoad.uucp> Date: 19 Jul 89 19:51:45 GMT References: <5458@b11.ingr.com> <2596@mit-caf.MIT.EDU> <1272@intercon.UUCP> Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) Organization: Eclectic Software, San Francisco Lines: 33 Thanks to Tim Endres for his very informative message on MacNFS. It may be of interest to some people that TOPS, A Sun Microsystems Company, was slated from the time of the acquisition by Sun to produce a Macintosh NFS, and to replace its current product TOPS with this Macintosh NFS. Last year, this attempt was abandoned. There are simply too many technical obstacles to producing a good NFS client or server that is compatible with the Macintosh file system. The efficiency constraints imposed by the RPC model are one major problem; the lack of flexibility of the NFS protocol is another. TOPS did negotiate with Sun over changes in the NFS protocol that would allow efficient operation with the Macintosh file system. However, these negotiations came to naught because of blocking on the Sun side. There never will be a good Macintosh NFS product, without major changes to the NFS protocol. Those changes will not happen. I don't mean to sound like a broken record here, but the fact is that NFS is *not* well suited to inter-operating-system environments. It works very well between UNIX systems, tolerably well between UNIX and the similarly ultra-simple MS/DOS file system. It does not work well when there is a complex file system like Macintosh or VMS involved. It can be made to work, but only with a great deal of difficulty and a very user-visible performance penalty. The supposedly inter-OS nature of NFS is a fabrication (albeit a sincere one) of starry-eyed Sun engineers; this aspect of the protocol was announced long before even a single non-UNIX implementation was done. -- Tim Maroney, Mac Software Consultant, sun!hoptoad!tim, tim@toad.com "There are no Famous People on the net. Only some of us with bigger mouths than others." -- Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, The Roach