Path: utzoo!telly!attcan!uunet!rbj From: rbj@uunet.UU.NET (Root Boy Jim) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: (was slashes, now NFS devices) Message-ID: <124320@uunet.UU.NET> Date: 28 Feb 91 20:47:33 GMT References: <124235@uunet.UU.NET> Organization: UUNET Communications Services, Falls Church, VA Lines: 44 In article thurlow@convex.com (Robert Thurlow) writes: >In <124235@uunet.UU.NET> rbj@uunet.UU.NET (Root Boy Jim) writes: > >>I hate to agree with the bellboys, but people, >>wake up and see the evils of NFS. > >So how about telling us about some of them, rather than just ranting? >Maybe those of us who work with the NFS code can learn something new. Well I just did. I will try and flesh out a few of them. * Datagrams - limit the scope of remote filesystems. I should be able to mount a file system across the country or around the the world, with permission of course. Do you actually think your datagrams will make it that far? And in time? Plus, TCP already has all the necessary timeout and flow control built into it. * Statelessness (& its friend idempotence) - this forces the breaking of many UNIX semantics. For example, you can't do append mode to files on every write. And BTW, what is a stale file handle? If it is truly stateless, why not just throw it away? * Devices - If you allow devices on other disks to refer to your system, you've created a big security hole. Besides, there is no way to refer to other systems' devices, even with their permission. * Audience - In an attempt to support generalized filesystems of OS's I will never use, they gave up the semantics of the one I truly care about, UNIX. Much better would have been a "foreign" switch to relax semantics for DOS, etc. >NFS gets work done around this company, to the point where I don't see >how we could do anything without it. We don't have anything to use in >its place, and by and large it works very well. I have some kvetches >about how Sun never fixes protocol bugs, but they don't affect me on a >daily basis. Yes, I agree that it is useful. So is the X Window System, altho it too is "a grave terminal disease". Both could be a lot better. The problem is that NFS doesn't deliver all that it (seems to) promise. It is really just a shadow of a remote UNIX file ststem. -- [rbj@uunet 1] stty sane unknown mode: sane