steve_romig@scarecrow.cis.ohio-state.edu (03/21/90)
I was wondering whether anyone reading this had been involved in the NFS connect-a-thon's in past years, and if so, if you could describe how things are tested against each other. Some particular questions: 1. How is the connect-a-thon 'run' in general? Do vendors just take 'pot-shots' at each other, or is there a systematic procedure of testing each product against a 'standard', or do they test all possible combinations of client/server products? 2. Is there a sort of standardized 'test suite' that is run to ensure that all (or most) aspects of NFS are used and that they work properly? Do the tests include such things as advisory file locking (where supported) and the handling of disk quotas? 3. If there is a 'test suite', is it publicly available? The main reason I ask is that we have several hundred Unix systems from 7 different vendors running about a dozen versions of various Unix OS's, and we frequently find ourselves in the middle of various unexpected NFS incompatibilities (eg, quota problems, file locking problems, group access problems). It would be nice to be able to find some of these automatically, especially when we introduce new systems/versions to the network. We already do this to some extent by hand, but this would be greatly facilitated if we had a more comprehensive test suite to use. If you haven't been involved in the connect-a-thon's, but have some interesting thoughts about or solutions to these problems, I'd also be interested in hearing from you. I'll be happy to summarize any answers I receive, so you can just send me a note by mail if you want. --- Steve Romig, 614-292-0915.