ddp+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU (Drew Daniel Perkins) (12/01/87)
It has been joked about for a while now, but it had to happen sooner or later.... Drew X-Digest-From: William LeFebvre <Sun-Spots-Request@rice.edu> X-Digest-Subject: Sun-Spots Digest, v5n64 X-Digest-To: Sun-Spots@rice.edu Message-Id: <1987.11.25.15.11.24.758.14837@rice.edu> Date: Fri, 13 Nov 87 15:28:12 PST From: ho@tis-w.arpa (Hilarie K. Orman) Subject: NFS over arpanet? I would like to hear from anyone who has tried to use NFS between Arpanet sites. I am advised that it would be painfully slow and awkward, but I would like to try. However, I cannot get "mount" to complete between the two test sites, so I cannot even begin to experience the pain. I have been in daily communication with Sun Support for two weeks about the following experiment between two arpanet machines: Both sites have NFS mounts running on their LAN's, so we know that the basic capability is there. The sites can rlogin to each, run FTP and Telnet, so we know the arpanet connectivity and addressing are OK. However, the command /etc/mount machine1:/glkspl /mnt results in an RPC timeout message after 20 seconds. Using the options "timeo=20000,rsize=512,wsize=512" doesn't alter anything at all, despite what you might think from reading the documentation. I think these options are only in effect after mount completes successfully, and the 20 second timeout is an unalterable parameter. I cannot see any evidence that machine1 ever sees the mount request. Does anyone know how to check this? Is rpcinfo definitive? Any help would be appreciated. Also any interest other sites might have in this capability should be expressed, since Sun's official opinion is "not supported".
slevy@UMN-REI-UC.ARPA (Stuart Levy) (12/01/87)
One problem we've had in NFSing between disparate machines is with naming them. The mount request passes the originating machine -name- rather than having the server use gethostbyaddr(). It's important to check that "hostname" on the client yields a name known to the server and vice versa. That's probably not the whole problem but can cause things to break. A guy from Proteon, Mick Scully (mcs@proteon.com) recently visited here and mentioned that he had mounted NFS filesystems at Berkeley across ARPAnet.