Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!auspex!guy
From: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.nfs
Subject: Re: Yes, Virginia, you *can* have UNIX filenames containing '/'
Message-ID: <449@auspex.UUCP>
Date: 14 Nov 88 17:51:10 GMT
References: <5945@fluke.COM> <10176@swan.ulowell.edu>
Reply-To: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 30

>So how does the server create such a file?
>
>The server has to ask the kernel (via syscalls, like everyone else)
>to create the file for it.

Uhh, no, it doesn't.  It has to ask the underlying *file system* to
create the file for it; the server is *part* of the kernel, at least in
the Sun implementation.

NFS requests don't contain pathnames, they contain component names. 
Thus, the NFS server passes the pathname a component at a time to the
file system; the components can contain '/'.

>It's possible that the RPC system calls are stupid (ie. they don't
>use lookupname); I've never seen kernel code for RPCs.  If so, then
>this is where the bug is, not in the server code.

I fail to see why it is *ipso facto* "stupid" not to use "lookupname". 
They aren't "RPC system calls"; for one thing, it's NFS, not RPC (you
can implement things that aren't system calls with RPC), and for
another, NFS calls don't have to correspond directly to system calls. 
Either

	1) the code in the file system implementation

or

	2) the code in the NFS server

should check for "/".