Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!pa.dec.com!decuac!hussar.dco.dec.com!mjr
From: mjr@hussar.dco.dec.com (Marcus J. Ranum)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Slashes in filenames?
Message-ID: <1991Feb22.141910.17013@decuac.dec.com>
Date: 22 Feb 91 14:19:10 GMT
References: <thurlow.666756073@convex.convex.com> <15236@smoke.brl.mil> <123382@uunet.UU.NET>
Organization: Digital Equipment Corp., Washington Ultrix Resource Center
Lines: 17

rbj@uunet.UU.NET (Root Boy Jim) writes:

>Remember when "NFS didn't do devices"? Now it does. The wrong way.

	Is there a right way? If NFS-mounted devices major and minors were
not interpreted as special on the client, then diskless nodes would have a
certain amount of trouble accessing stuff through /dev. I suppose some kind
of flag in the mount to indicate whether major/minor interpretation should
be done locally or on the remote machine would work, but it wouldn't handle
NFS' "stateless" model when dealing with tape drives, for example. Would
the tape drive (if the rewind device) rewind after every write? I forget.

	Basically NFS is an de facto standard kludge. It's also a kludge
that lets a lot of people get what they want done fairly easily, and it's
hard to argue against that.

mjr.


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