buck@siswat.UUCP (A. Lester Buck) (01/10/89)
I need to learn about NFS but only know the small bits I have picked up by reading various (other) newsgroups. Could someone please recommend good technical publications on NFS? I am looking for a reasonably detailed discussion of the concepts and capabilities, but light on implementation specific details. Any specific reference to Sun documentation that I could order would be terrific. Now a few specific questions: Can NFS handle the idea of records in files, as on mainframes? (I hear Intel has some implementation for this.) Is this handled by putting some record layering code in the file pipeline, or what? References would be great. Can NFS handle different character codes (i.e., ASCII to/from EBCDIC) between machines? Not the simple case of all text or all binary, but say a database with binary fields and character fields within a record. Again, is there a hook for a filter within the file data stream. Or is there no way to handle such things transparently? What prompted these questions: I am doing some contract driver work for a local company just getting its feet wet in Unix (AIX). They are a massive IBM customer and want their new RT workstations to have access to seismic data sets on the mainframes (MVS). IBM is looking for a testbed for their planned implementation of NFS using TCP/IP on mainframes, and they want to experiment on this company's machines. I told them I didn't know anything about NFS, but they had me sit in on the meeting anyway and now I am interested in learning more. Thanks for any help, -- A. Lester Buck ...!uhnix1!moray!siswat!buck