Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!osu-cis!att-cb!att-ih!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.UUCP (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans
Subject: Re: NFS vs RFS
Message-ID: <3845@chinet.UUCP>
Date: 20 Mar 88 19:14:48 GMT
References: <10370@ut-sally.UUCP> <720@uel.uel.co.uk> <45291@sun.uucp> <184@quick.COM> <2917@sfsup.UUCP>
Reply-To: les@chinet.UUCP (Leslie Mikesell)
Distribution: na
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 15

>> Another problem with RFS is that the control structures are passed
>> around in native binary (or so say the AT&T training folks), so you
>..  RFS _does_ run
>across machines with different alignment and byte-ordering requirements.
>Data written by an application is not converted, since there is no way 
>for RFS to know the structure of the data to convert it to a canonical form.

Likewise for the structs passed to ioctl() for various devices.  Thus the
advantage of RFS being able to access remotely-mounted devices applies
only to similar machines.  Has anyone mentioned that currently RFS only
supports mounting of complete directories (no symbolic links to files)?
This sort of precludes sharing anything from /etc ....

  Les Mikesell
                              ..ihnp4!chinet!les