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From: drake@ibmarc.uucp (Sam Drake/99999999)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt
Subject: Re: /native
Message-ID: <834@ks.UUCP>
Date: 18 May 89 17:59:35 GMT
References: <11198@netnews.upenn.edu>
Sender: news@ibmarc.UUCP
Reply-To: drake@ibmarc.UUCP (Sam Drake/99999999)
Organization: IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose
Lines: 26

In an environment where you are using NFS or DS to overmount lots
of files from remote systems, it's sometimes desirable to be able 
to have access to the files that you've mounted over.  By taking 
all local filesystems and putting them in /native, you can always
get to them if you so choose.  If you normally remote mount a 
directory but want to have a local copy in case the server goes
down, it's convenient to be able to make the local copy by issuing
"cp /a/b/c/* /native/a/b/c".

The /native stuff is in the base AIX 2.2 product.

Another reason for it is that there's no reason for "skulker" to
go cleaning up remotely mounted filesystems...if you have a file
server with 50 clients, you don't need to have 50 systems banging
on the server at 3am trying to clean up .bak files etc...one will
do just fine.  So skulker cleans up /native, not /, and thus doesn't
get any remote mounted directories or files.  (The "skulker" program
is run by cron at 3am to perform various cleanup functions.)

I'm not in AIX development, just an AIX user, and I'm speaking for
myself, not for IBM.  Nothing I say is accurate.  :-)

Sam Drake / IBM Almaden Research Center 
VNET:      DRAKE at ALMADEN       BITNET:  DRAKE at ALMVMA
Internet:  drake@ibm.com          UUCP:    uunet!ibmarc!drake
Phone:     (408) 927-1861         IBM Tieline: 457-1861