Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!snowhite.cis.uoguelph.CA!root
From: root@snowhite.cis.uoguelph.CA
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.ibmpc
Subject: Public Domain NFS
Message-ID: <8812171427.aa05527@Louie.UDEL.EDU>
Date: 17 Dec 88 19:21:58 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 32

I know I am going to end up with egg on my face, but here goes...

> interesting tidbits.  Redistributable as part of a product.  Written with a
> simple, extensible, slow, and memory intensive attitude, but it can be
- therefore, I avoided using the Sun RPC code entirely and built the RPCs
  directly in mbuf lists

(I didn't realize BIOS referred to the driver level interface but not the
 DOS function calls and as such I was misusing the term, however)

suppose you wrote a driver that looked like a vdisk, with a large cluster
size and a big FAT table size
- then when reads occur on sectors of the root dir. you translate them to
  NFS readdir and lookup rpc's and fake DOS dir entries with the first
  cluster numbers faked as values such that each file's clusters are
  referenced by different sectors of the FAT (1 or 2 sectors should be
  enough space in the FAT for a file with a big cluster size)
- then reads of the FAT sectors can be recognized as such and faked with
  sequential cluster #'s in it
--> reads on the file would become reads on well known sector #'s that
  could be translated to NFS read rpc's
OR some other kludgey scheme that generates a fake FAT table such that
  the driver knows what part of which file is being accessed when a
  read/write request is made on sectors of the virtual disk
admittedly, subdirectories and writing files such that they grow would
be very messy, since you would have to remember the FAT updates and
at least the name and fake first cluster # part of all fake directory
entries generated. (I am guessing that DOS doesn't cache this stuff
and reads the directory file every time a file is opened??)

For our institution, even a kludgey read only pc nfs would be useful if
it was free.