Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!yale!cmcl2!phri!roy
From: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.nfs
Subject: Re: PC NFS
Keywords: Integration of PCs and SUNs
Message-ID: <3781@phri.UUCP>
Date: 23 May 89 01:30:17 GMT
References: <17676@vrdxhq.verdix.com>
Reply-To: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Organization: Public Health Research Inst. (NY, NY)
Lines: 40

williams@vrdxhq.verdix.com (Tim Williams) writes:
> Has anyone out there had any experience with the use of PC NFS which allows
> DOS based PCs to use a SUN as a file server.

	We have been using PC-NFS for a year or more and are reasonably
happy with it.  We use the 3Com-503 card that Sun sells.  I suspect you can
get other (possibly better) cards from other sources for less money, but we
figured we'd avoid hassles getting everything from one vendor.  I'm not
really a network guru, so I can't comment on the fine points, but it does
seem to work.

	We mount disks from our Sun-3/180 file servers running SunOS-3.5.2
and Vax-11/750 running MtXinu 4.3BSD/NFS, mostly so people can store their
1.5 Mbyte digitized images on the Sun's big disks (the PC exists mostly to
drive a raster scan device).  The funkiest thing we've done so far is a
direct PC-Macintosh ftp transfer using the ftp client that comes with
PC-NFS on the PC and the NCSA ftp server.  We had to start up the ftp
server by hand on the Mac, but it worked fine after that.

	Setup was, to my mind, kind of complicated.  I should qualify that
by saying that I know next to nothing about DOS so whereas I was totally
baffled by what needed to put in which startup file may be completely
second nature to somebody who really knows their way around a DOS system.
There is a rather nice menu-driven config program to gather information
like IP addresses and host names.  PC-NFS knows how to talk to YP servers
(but, I don't think it can talk to nameservers, or at least the version we
have doesn't seem to be able to).  It knows about arp and rarp, subnets,
and configurable broadcast addresses.  With the help of a pcnfsd running on
some server on your network (they supply pcnfsd source) you can to print to
printers under control of the Berkeley lpr spooling mechanism.  They supply
a telnet(vt100) and ftp client too.  About the only thing missing to make a
PC a full-fledged network machine is SMTP, but I think that may be an
option.  It's not entirely clear what good an SMTP server does on a PC, but
it might be nice to be able to send mail, and maybe read it using some sort
of POP client.
-- 
Roy Smith, System Administrator
Public Health Research Institute
{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy -or- roy@phri.nyu.edu
"The connector is the network"