bzs@bu-cs.bu.EDU (Barry Shein) (01/08/87)
Are there people out there actually running RFS who would like to comment on it? Everything said so far makes RFS sound so hypothetical. Particularly outside of AT&T and even more particularly anyone with experience with NFS also although I for one would appreciate anyone's views from a practiced standpoint. Also, re Doug Gwyn's question about "is yp_ a necessary part of NFS?" I don't see why it should be, the Yellow Pages is a way to distribute network (and other) database queries allowing multiple servers and clients layered on RPC. Current implementations of NFS might use YP for these functions but I can't see why gethostbyname() or similar calls couldn't just be done 'the old fashioned way' (grovel through a local and probably out of date and inconsistent /etc/hosts file...) Why such a negative reaction to it Doug? It seems like a needed service, obviously not if you have one machine which is the center of your world (maybe that's how you see your Gould?) but in an environment like ours I'd sure hate to try to keep a few dozen /etc/hosts files et alia up to date (and growing.) Does RFS/SYSVR3 have any way to share network databases? -Barry Shein, Boston University
D0430@PUCC.BITNET (Paul Lansky) (01/09/87)
In article <2225@brl-adm.ARPA>, bzs@bu-cs.bu.EDU (Barry Shein) writes: > >Are there people out there actually running RFS who would like to >comment on it? Everything said so far makes RFS sound so hypothetical. >Particularly outside of AT&T and even more particularly anyone with >experience with NFS also although I for one would appreciate anyone's >views from a practiced standpoint. We are running it on a pair of UvaxIIs, under Ultrix1.1. It took some hacking to get up, but it has been wonderful. It is quite transparent and we make heavy use of symbolic links with it. When one machine goes down linked directories simply appear as symbolic links to junk, but everything else is fine. Overhead seems to be minimal. Most users are quite unaware of the machine on which many files they use. I have no experience with NFS, but expect to use it since it will probably be easier to upgrade with it than with RFS.
ed@mtxinu.UUCP (Ed Gould) (01/09/87)
>>Are there people out there actually running RFS who would like to >>comment on it? > > We are running it on a pair of UvaxIIs, under Ultrix1.1. It took some > hacking to get up ... There are *two* things in the world called RFS. One is AT&T's Remote File Sharing, the other is Tod Brunhoff's freely-distributed Remote File System. The discussion was intended to be about the former; I suspect that anything hacked into Ultrid is the latter. -- Ed Gould mt Xinu, 2560 Ninth St., Berkeley, CA 94710 USA {ucbvax,decvax}!mtxinu!ed +1 415 644 0146 "A man of quality is not threatened by a woman of equality."
gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) (01/09/87)
In article <2225@brl-adm.ARPA> bzs@bu-cs.bu.EDU (Barry Shein) writes: >Also, re Doug Gwyn's question about "is yp_ a necessary part of NFS?" People have since informed me that NFS can exist without YP, and indeed at least one major vendor provides NFS but not YP. Our local YP-worker doesn't like it much either. >... I'd sure hate to try to keep a few dozen >/etc/hosts files et alia up to date (and growing.) That's what domain name servers are for.
monkey@unixprt.UUCP (Monkey Face@unixprt) (01/10/87)
In article <2225@brl-adm.ARPA>, bzs@bu-cs.bu.EDU (Barry Shein) writes: > Does RFS/SYSVR3 have any way to share network databases? Yes, the name-server concept provides such a service. Also, includes the ability to have secondary name-servers take over when the primary dies.
mack@humming.UUCP (Ed Mackenty) (01/10/87)
In article <2225@brl-adm.ARPA> bzs@bu-cs.bu.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:
[A request for comments on RFS and NFS, and NFS yellow pages.]
At this site we have two Suns using NFS to share each other's disks, and
about 20 AT's using PC-NFS that can access the Suns disks as well.
The suns can't get to the AT's disks since MS-DOS is brain-damaged :-).
It gives us a really nice development environment for our AT-based code.
We keep all the source under SCCS on a Sun, edit on the Sun (some folk
edit with PC editors), and run make on an AT to put it all together.
The Sun's disk looks like just another hard disk to the AT. When we want
to distribute a new version of some program, we just put it in the right
place on the Sun, and every AT gets it. They can even have remote
directory specs in their PATH variable. Although there are some problems,
they have to do with PC-NFS, not NFS in general (such as not being able
to execute jobs on the Sun from an AT without using telnet and logging in).
We do not use the Yellow Pages functionality at all here. Since all our
NFS machines really only share two disks, maintaining the /etc/hosts files
on the two Suns is trivial. Since the AT's can't share each other's disks,
there is no reason to update their hosts file when a new AT is added.
We really like NFS. Without it, our software development on the AT's
would be slowed incredibly and we'd have all kinds of source control
problems. The folks at Sun said the next version of PC-NFS will have
an RPC service to invoke remote shells which will allow us to issue SCCS
commands directly from an AT. I might actually start using mine if it
could do that. :-)
- MacK.
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