Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!decvax!eagle_snax!geoff
From: geoff@eagle_snax.UUCP ( R.H. coast near the top)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans
Subject: Re: NFS vs RFS
Message-ID: <450@eagle_snax.UUCP>
Date: 23 Jan 89 14:29:11 GMT
References: <9018@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> <7387@chinet.chi.il.us> <437@aurora.AthabascaU.CA> <340@moriaMoria.Sp.Unisys.Com> <709@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu> <2735@rti.UUCP>
Reply-To: geoff@eagle_snax.UUCP (Geoff Arnold @ Sun ECD - R.H. coast near the top)
Followup-To: comp.protocols.nfs
Organization: Sun Microsystems - East Coast Division
Lines: 36

In article <2735@rti.UUCP> mcm@rti.UUCP (Mike Mitchell) writes:
>
>I find it very strange that NFS insists that stateless servers are
>the best, but then has to add statefull servers to handle locking and
>other things.

People always assume that there is a clean, simple dichotomy between
stateful and stateless designs. The key issue to my mind is not
"stateful vs. stateless" but "fault-tolerant vs. fault intolerant".
RFS and many other systems are designed as fault-intolerant: if the
server is lost (crashes or becomes inaccessible) client applications
will fail. NFS was designed to be fault tolerant, and a variety of mechanisms
were used to achieve this. For file sharing, statelessness seemed to
deliver the best results. For file locking, a stateful design was
obviously necessary, so a state recovery procedure was developed to
handle server or network failure.

> NFS claims to work in a heterogeneous UNIX environment,
>but to do that each hardware vendor has had to re-write their operating
>system.  They get the template to do the re-write from SUN, so it seems
>to me that NFS gets around heterogeneity problems by making everyone
>run the same OS.  Now everything is homogeneous as far as NFS is concerned.

Unix is Unix is Unix... it's already fairly homogeneous, so what's
your problem with sharing a little more code? There's no real difference
between NFS and RFS in this respect. But you are ignoring the various
non-Unix implementations - MS-DOS (multiple), AmigaDOS, VMS, MVS, VM, etc. -
most of which were implemented straight from the spec.

I won't waste network bandwidth with the full list of NFS licensees.
It's more than marketing hype, my friend.
-- 
Geoff Arnold, Sun Microsystems Inc.  | "It is well known that the longer one
PC Dist. Sys. Group (home of PC-NFS) |postpones a pleasure, the greater the
UUCP: {hplabs,decwrl...}!sun!garnold |pleasure when it arrives. Therefore, if
ARPA: garnold@sun.com                |one postpones it forever..." (Smullyan)