mtsu@blake.acs.washington.edu (Montana State) (03/24/89)
OK, here are what I hope some simple questions, if they're RTFM then somebody tell me where. 1) NFS is supposed to be a "stateless" protocol. What good is a stateless protocol that requires a whole schmeer of stateful servers to provide "most" of the semantics of the Unix file system? I'm thinking specifically of all of Sun's quotadaemons, lockdaemons, etc etc. ad nauseum. 2) If I have a 'quota' partition on one machine (machineA) which is NFS mounted on machineB, will write()'s done by the user on machineB fail if the user is over-quota on machineA where the quotas are kept?? I tried it a few times, and it appears to be that way, but is this behavior guaranteed?? 3) If I have a disk partition mounted ro (read-only) and then I want to remount it rw (read-write) how do I find who has an open file on that partition that's keeping me from doing a umount on it. (Short of shutting the machine down). 4) Does doing a full backup, newfs, and a full restore really accomplish anything constructive? (Short of testing MTBF's for tapes and drives??). 5) Does the out-of-band signaling part of the Ultrix networking software work?? I'm not having much luck.
gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn ) (03/24/89)
In article <1316@blake.acs.washington.edu> icsu6000@caesar.cs.montana.edu (Jaye Mathisen) writes: >1) NFS is supposed to be a "stateless" protocol. What good is a stateless >protocol that requires a whole schmeer of stateful servers to provide >"most" of the semantics of the Unix file system? By not having to propagate revised state information around to all users of a file whenever any one of them makes a change, supposedly efficiency is improved. Also, core NFS deliberately lacks some UNIX file system semantics to make it compatible with non-UNIX file systems, MS-DOS in particular. In a UNIX environment, I agree with your implication that the RFS (stateful) approach is generally better. I especially like RFS's preservation of device driver semantics across multiple hops. I never did hear how AT&T was going to solve the problem of ioctl data format incompatibility among heterogeneous systems, though.