Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncr-sd!hp-sdd!hplabs!ucbvax!proteon.com!jas
From: jas@proteon.com ("John A. Shriver")
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.ibmpc
Subject: public domain support for Sun NFS standard
Message-ID: <8812161645.AA10438@monk.proteon.com>
Date: 16 Dec 88 16:45:45 GMT
References: <493*andchan@ccu.UManitoba.CA>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 16

The lack of a public domain PC NFS has very little to do with the
issues of NFS/RPC/UDP/IP/...  It has to do with the fact that the
interface to the MS-DOS redirector is essentially a highly-guarded
trade secret of Microsoft, available only if you sign up as a
MS-Networks OEM.  This is not cheap, last I knew you had to pay by the
year.  There are people who have sucessfully reverse-engineered this
interface (eg. Locus), but they consider it highly valuable
information, and also sell it for a pretty penny.

I have no idea what would happen if someone did the reverse
engineering and then put the results in the public domain.  Lawsuits?

Oh yes, it would not be hard to make a PC do NFS file service.
Unfortunately, a PC, it's BIOS, and DOS offer pretty abysmal file
performance, so it would not be a good file server.  (Interrupts off
during disk I/O does not help the NFS side of things.)