Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!pacbell!att-ih!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.UUCP (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans
Subject: Re: NFS vs RFS
Message-ID: <4456@chinet.UUCP>
Date: 1 Apr 88 21:53:55 GMT
References: <4192@chinet.UUCP> <933@nusdhub.UUCP>
Reply-To: les@chinet.UUCP (Leslie Mikesell)
Distribution: na
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 24

In article <933@nusdhub.UUCP> rwhite@nusdhub.UUCP (Robert C. White Jr.) writes:
>> 
>> But my point was about passing ioctl()s to remote devices.  The type
>
>The RFS file system is a UNIQUE "device"
>	Put in a simpler form:  Your kernel dosn't understand
>TCP/IP, RFS, NFS, IPC, SNA, BSC, or anything else until you
...
>I still don't see your problem, and aparently neither do the

Do any of those other things let you mount /dev from a remote machine
and proceed to open and use the special files there in the same ways
that you would use local devices (transparently, as they say..)?
RFS does, and with similar machines you can do things that require
passing structs to ioctl(), as is required for example to set the
modes on a tty line on the remote machine (see termio.h on a sysV machine).
This is not at all the same as dealing with normal (non-special) files on
a remote machine.  In the case of normal files both machines can know how to
translate each others requests.  In the case of remote devices, the
nature of the struct passed to ioctl() may be known only to the remote
machine.  The termio struct could probably be made a special case, but
other devices require other types of structs...

  Les Mikesell
                     ..ihnp4!chinet!les