Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncrcae!hubcap!gatech!purdue!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!geneva.rutgers.edu!hedrick From: hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans Subject: Re: NFS vs RFS Message-ID: Date: 19 Jan 89 03:05:52 GMT References: <9018@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> <7387@chinet.chi.il.us> <437@aurora.AthabascaU.CA> <340@moriaMoria.Sp.Unisys.Com> <247@bnr-fos.UUCP> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 24 I'm currently running on a diskless Sun 3/50. All of my files (and swapping) are done via NFS. As far as I can tell, the machine is still Unix. I think when people say that RFS follows "Unix semantics" more than NFS, they mean one or both of: - if you open /dev/tty1 on another machine over RFS and cat to it, it comes out on the remote machine's tty1. If you do this under Sun's NFS, it comes out of tty1 on your own machine. Sun's behavior is right for a protocol intended to support diskless machines. My /dev directory, like all the rest of my disk, is on my file server. I want to treat my file server as if it were my own disk. When I open /dev/tty, it want *my* /dev/tty, not the server's. (I know little about RFS. It's certainly possible that RFS has a way to get both behaviors.) - the NFS protocol itself doesn't include file locking. However Sun has a related protocol that does do locking. Sun's systems are intended to meet the full SVID, including locking. There has been a history of bugs in file locking, and it's not clear to me that even now it is totally bug free, but this isn't a protocol issue: the protocol support is present.