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From: jqj@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (J Q Johnson)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards,net.lan
Subject: NFS future enhancements?
Message-ID: <596@gvax.cs.cornell.edu>
Date: Tue, 4-Nov-86 07:23:42 EST
Article-I.D.: gvax.596
Posted: Tue Nov  4 07:23:42 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 5-Nov-86 21:32:33 EST
Reply-To: jqj@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (J Q Johnson)
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY
Lines: 25
Xref: mnetor net.unix-wizards:8616 net.lan:1021

With SUN NFS rapidly becomming an (the?) industry standard for distributed
file systems, it becomes increasingly interesting to ask what enhancements
to NFS are planned or likely in the future.  SUN has at various times
indicated an intention of providing record locking and support for swapping
through NFS; in one document SUN claims to be "considering implementation
of ... replicated data."

What distributed file system features do sophisticated users see as
important -- what features would you like to see added to NFS or to NFS
implementations?

As examples of such advanced features, consider location independent naming
and file replication.  Location independent naming in general seems like it
would be very hard to add to an NFS framework, but perhaps NFS is powerful
enough to at least support enough location transparency for some types of
replication.

Replication is something that I'd dearly love to have, at least for failure
recovery.  If a file server goes down, I still want to be able to get at my
files from my diskless workstation!  Full replication (with serialization)
would be desirable, but disk shadowing with automatic remounting of a backup
copy of my files would probably be adequate for many purposes.

I'm sure you can think of other things for a wish list.  Now the key
question:  is anyone working on such extensions to SUN NFS?