Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!motcsd!hpda!hpcuhb!hpindda!human
From: human@hpindda.HP.COM (Aaron Schuman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
Subject: Re: nfs for hp3000
Message-ID: <4310078@hpindda.HP.COM>
Date: 4 Dec 89 17:03:50 GMT
References: <127@kgw2.UUCP>
Organization: 1+408-447-3158
Lines: 26

I'd love to see NFS on the HP3000 too!  

There are some serious technical problems:

The HP3000 has a three tiered file system (file.group.account),
but DOS and Unix machines have arbitrarily deep directory trees.
There wouldn't be a clean mapping from file names on your Sun
server to file names on your MPE client.

It would be possible to create a shell that sits on top of MPE's
file system, so that references into directory trees are first
looked up in a database, then the file system calls are transparently
mapped to calls to MPE-format file names ... You get the idea.
It would be possible, but not easy.

Where Unix systems have flat files, MPE supports some highly
structured files.  This is one of the features that makes MPE
well suited to data base applications.  But how are you going
to get a non-MPE file server to understand KSAM files or even
numbered TDP files?

I guess none of these obstacles are insurmountable.  It's only
software!  But they're big enough that HP's management hasn't
wanted to tackle the problem, at least not yet, and they're big
enough that nobody's been willing to solve it on their own on
the weekends.