Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!labrea!Portia!Jessica!morgan
From: morgan@Jessica.stanford.edu (RL "Bob" Morgan)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.nfs
Subject: More Problems with PC-NFS
Message-ID: <4025@Portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 24 Oct 88 23:40:12 GMT
Sender: news@Portia.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: morgan@Jessica.stanford.edu (RL "Bob" Morgan)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 26



I've lived through a few generations of 3Com's disk/file service
products (EtherShare, 3+Share), and am now fiddling with PC-NFS.  One
major improvement that appeared in the 3Com product a while ago (I
believe it came with the change to 3+) was in its handling of missing
drives/directories in the PC's search path.  Under EtherSeries, if
your PC's search path contained a spec for a drive that was not
mounted, you would get a "Drive not ready" error and have to hit a key
to continue.  Most annoying.  Using 3+, a message like "Unmounted
drive in search path" appears, but the search continues and your
program gets found and executed (or whatever).  (Unix, of course,
continues its search in silence.  I once heard that some large
percentage of all directory lookups are to such non-existent
directories.)

PC-NFS seems to recreate the "Drive not ready"/block problem.  Is this
a bug or a feature?  Or is it something I'm doing wrong?

On this topic, does PC-NFS fully support the DOS 3.1-or-greater
network-aware file service semantics, so that network-aware programs
(multi-user databases, frex) work properly?

 - RL "Bob" Morgan
   Networking Systems
   Stanford