Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!ames!ptsfa!hoptoad!academ!uhnix1!soma!masscomp-request From: david@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov (David Robinson) Newsgroups: comp.sys.masscomp Subject: Re: Random data about the upcoming NFS release Message-ID: <3251@soma.bcm.tmc.edu> Date: Mon, 2-Nov-87 10:33:46 EST Article-I.D.: soma.3251 Posted: Mon Nov 2 10:33:46 1987 Date-Received: Tue, 10-Nov-87 04:52:47 EST References: <3243@soma.bcm.tmc.edu> Sender: masscomp@soma.bcm.tmc.edu Organization: Image Analysis Systems Grp, JPL Lines: 44 Approved: masscomp@soma.bcm.tmc.edu Summary: Don't understand their logic As someone who has done a lot of work with NFS on a wide variety of machines I am somewhat confused on Masscomp's statements. I too heard what Stan indicated from Masscomp when they talked to JPL about being a beta site for 4.0. The claim was that for NFS to work you needed to have the EXOS 301 board, which just 2 months ago they said they were still evaluating it. Given the nature of NFS and the fact that almost all of the client NFS code has tunable parameters I can see no logical reason why you could not run it with a 201 or with a 68000/10. My understanding is that the 301 is identical with the 201 except faster, a Masscomp techie even told me when they first got one for testing the plugged it in and it worked. This may mean that NFS will be slow on the 201/68010 systems but that should not make it unusable. I have ran NFS on systems that during debugging phases would take *seconds* to respond to some requests and with a properly configured client it worked perfectly. The two major trouble points tend to be a machine not responding fast enough for a client which usually is configurable via "timeo" to a higher value, and a server not accepting 8K of UDP packets back to back which can be tuned via shrinking the read and write sizes. My personal theory is that Masscomp thinks people will only except fast NFS systems or they want to sell a bunch of 301 boards. If you can live with slower performence then you might not need to buy a 301. -David P.S. The 201 boards are horribly slow, a 68010 with in kernel TCP/IP is considerably faster than a 201 board. -- David Robinson elroy!david@csvax.caltech.edu ARPA david@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov ames!elroy!david UUCP Disclaimer: No one listens to me anyway!