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From: boyd@basser.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Mixing vaxen and suns on NFS
Message-ID: <895@basser.oz>
Date: Tue, 24-Mar-87 04:09:45 EST
Article-I.D.: basser.895
Posted: Tue Mar 24 04:09:45 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 26-Mar-87 01:14:24 EST
References: <669@kulcs.UUCP>
Reply-To: boyd@basser.oz (Boyd Roberts)
Distribution: world
Organization: Dept of Comp Sci, Uni of Sydney, Australia
Lines: 43
Keywords: NFS serious-braindamage

In article <669@kulcs.UUCP> andre@kulcs.UUCP (Andre De Deurwaerder) writes:
>We have a number of sun's and a number of vaxen, and plan to install
>4.3BSD + NFS from Mt Xinu soon.
>
>Once this has been installed, we would like to give our users a single
>home directory, to be used both when the user logs in on a sun and when
>he/she logs in on a vax.

Well, I would never ever suggest to anyone to run NFS
with your home directory on another machine.  It's ok for the
5 minute mail read, but *where* are you when the server crashes?
It's barbed-wire canoe time.  

Sourcing a disparate .profile amidst the ``not found'' and ``core dumped''
gnashing of teeth, is going to cause you a small amount of trouble.
And, who *wants* to dump core across the wire?  

You've got to log in to a local disk.  Otherwise, the solution is to build
stuff into your .profile that goes...

    case "`hostname`" in
    ...)
	client dependant junk...
	;;

    esac

But, that'll become a real problem.  Once logged on ok to a local disk
you'll be ok to NFS to other things.  But, ``you've got to ask yourself
one question.  do you feel lucky?''  I hate it when a server crashes.

NFS doesn't address the presentation layer.  XDR is a hack, there are wider
issues that it doesn't cater for.  NFS is only *really* usable in
a homogeneous or text file environment.  Forget anything but textfiles in a
hetrogeneous environment.  And then, the text had better make sense on the
client.


Boyd Roberts		boyd@basser.oz

``When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro...''

Copyright 1987 Boyd Roberts            Restricted Redistribution Prohibited.