Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!samsung!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!tektronix!reed!intelhf!ichips!inews!quasar!kseshadr From: kseshadr@quasar.intel.com (Kishore Seshadri) Newsgroups: comp.unix.internals Subject: Re: (was slashes, now NFS devices) Message-ID: <2882@inews.intel.com> Date: 6 Mar 91 20:58:48 GMT References: <15236@smoke.brl.mil> <123382@uunet.UU.NET> <1991Feb22.141910.17013@decuac.dec.com> <14363@ulysses.att.com> Sender: news@inews.intel.com Reply-To: kseshadr@quasar.intel.com (Kishore Seshadri) Lines: 27 In article , peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes: |> In article fwp1@CC.MsState.Edu (Frank Peters) writes: |> > > If you can access remote files, why can't you access remote devices using |> > > the same mechanism? Under RFS, special files are interpreted by the server. |> > 2. This is probably most important. NFS is stateless. |> |> This is the killer. I think it would be reasonable to relax statelessness |> for devices, though. Isn't this the equivalent of being a 'little' pregnant. To me there seem to be some very basic inherent differences in the semanntics of files and devices. Just because Unix has traditionally provided entry points into devices through the filesystem, this doesn't necessarily rationalize changing NFS's statelessness to support this feature. I agree it would be nice to have, but it should probably implemented as a separate state-full protocol(s), and let people pick the one they like. This is like the locking problem, a wart on the side of NFS as McVoy put it, but some problems are by nature, intractable in environments they occur in. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kishore Seshadri,(speaking for myself) Intel Corporation <..!intelca!mipos3!kseshadr> Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.