Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!munnari.oz.au!cs.mu.oz.au!ok
From: ok@cs.mu.oz.au (Richard O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Making a named pipe over NFS
Keywords: /etc/mknod, fifo, NFS, SunOS
Message-ID: <2424@munnari.oz.au>
Date: 14 Oct 89 07:02:35 GMT
References: <2388@munnari.oz.au> <2229@cbnewsl.ATT.COM> <2415@munnari.oz.au> <3208@rti.UUCP>
Sender: news@cs.mu.oz.au
Lines: 21

In article <3208@rti.UUCP>, trt@rti.UUCP (Thomas Truscott) writes:
> Give me a break!  Modern versions of NFS can create named pipe _entries_
> in remote filesystems, but the _contents_ of the pipe never
> leave the client.  Processes on different clients
> CAN NOT share data using a common named pipe,
> because under NFS it just doesn't work that way.
> Each different client gets its own local instance of the pipe.
> To say that "NFS supports remote named pipes" is highly misleading.

Thank you very much for the clarification.
(I was careful to avoid saying that NFS supports named pipes;
 only to claim that I could apparently make one over NFS.)
If it's not going to work, I do wish /etc/mknod would have
the courtesy to report and error and not do anything rather
than give me an empty file or a named pipe I can't use.

> Our group at RTI has a neat distributed file/computing system
> called Freedomnet ...

Surely it isn't advertising if you're _asked_, so, tell us more
about Freedomnet.  How different is it from TCF?