Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!brunix!gjb
From: gjb@cs.brown.edu (Greg Brail)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: What I'd like to see in the AppleShare of the 90's
Message-ID: <25184@brunix.UUCP>
Date: 11 Jan 90 22:45:22 GMT
Sender: news@brunix.UUCP
Reply-To: gjb@cs.brown.edu (Greg Brail)
Organization: Brown University Department of Computer Science
Lines: 29

One of the things Sun's NFS distributed file serving protocol has
going for it is "hard mounting." This means that if a UNIX process is
talking to a file server and it loses the connection to that server,
the process will wait forever (i.e. until the file server connection
is restored or the machine rebooted) before it tries to do anything
else. Although this can be a pain when debugging flaky networks, it
saves lots of data on networks that work properly.

Why can't AppleShare have something like this? Currently, if the
AppleShare connection is lost because the network is unplugged or the
server crashes, a dialog box appears saying you lost the connection to
the server, the server is disconnected and your program crashes. If
AppleShare instead put up a dialog box saying "The server has been
disconnected" and then waited until it could reconnect, no one would
lose their work. The client software could even ask the user to type
their password again to ensure security when the server comes back.

I have seen countless people lose work because the network was
accidentally unplugged (I know--I should use PhoneNet). If AppleShare
had a protocol similar to the NFS protocol, this could all be avoided.

For all I know, this could be completely impossible to implement in
AppleShare. But wouldn't it be nice if it were? How about it, Apple?

				-greg
+----------------------------------------------------+
Greg Brail
Internet: gjb@cs.brown.edu  BITNET: gjb@browncs.bitnet
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