Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!nuchat!uhnix1!soma!masscomp-request
From: alan@masscomp.UUCP (Alan Atlas)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.masscomp
Subject: Re: PC-Masscomp Ethernet
Message-ID: <3349@soma.bcm.tmc.edu>
Date: 10 Mar 88 10:18:02 GMT
References: <3301@soma.bcm.tmc.edu> <3337@soma.bcm.tmc.edu>
Sender: masscomp@soma.bcm.tmc.edu
Reply-To: alan@masscomp.UUCP (Alan Atlas)
Organization: MASSCOMP - Westford, Ma
Lines: 27
Approved: masscomp@soma.bcm.tmc.edu


In article <3337@soma.bcm.tmc.edu> dalesys@lamont.columbia.edu (dale chayes) writes:
>
>The big advantage of Sun's PC-NFS is that it WOULD allow you to use your
>masscomp's disk (or parts of it) as if they were a part of your PC's file
>system. IE: from DOS you could mount node:/usr/dale as drive F:. Now 
>that is really a neat and in may cases useful feature. Unfortunately,
>it looks like Masscomp is not going to support the pcnfs daemon in the
>forthcomming release of RTU and NFS. Perhaps someday that will happen.
>
Actually, we tested our NFS implementation against a PC running PC-NFS
and it worked fine.  We ran programs on the PC that were stored on the
MASSCOMP disk, and we looked at files from machine to machine.  When
we did that work, the pcnfs daemon wasn't around.  We will be looking at
it for possible inclusion in RTU in the future, but for now just PC-NFS
and RTU 4.0 will allow you to share files between MASSCOMPs and PCs.


[ pcnfsd is supplied on the pc disk that comes with pc-nfs in source form.
So, that is one way to get pcnfsd to run on the MASSCOMP. It should be noted
that pcnfsd provides the following services to the pc-nfs user that would
otherwise be unavailable: (1) user authentication -- If the file systems
that are nfs-mounted are not world readable or writable, you're stuck! With
user authentication, you can tell the computer from which you have mounted
these file systems who you really are. (2) Printing from the pc on the
unix printer -- this would not be available on the MASSCOMP anyway since they
use the SYSTEM V line printer spooler which is not network capable. --sob]