morgan@Jessica.stanford.edu (RL "Bob" Morgan) (10/25/88)
I've lived through a few generations of 3Com's disk/file service products (EtherShare, 3+Share), and am now fiddling with PC-NFS. One major improvement that appeared in the 3Com product a while ago (I believe it came with the change to 3+) was in its handling of missing drives/directories in the PC's search path. Under EtherSeries, if your PC's search path contained a spec for a drive that was not mounted, you would get a "Drive not ready" error and have to hit a key to continue. Most annoying. Using 3+, a message like "Unmounted drive in search path" appears, but the search continues and your program gets found and executed (or whatever). (Unix, of course, continues its search in silence. I once heard that some large percentage of all directory lookups are to such non-existent directories.) PC-NFS seems to recreate the "Drive not ready"/block problem. Is this a bug or a feature? Or is it something I'm doing wrong? On this topic, does PC-NFS fully support the DOS 3.1-or-greater network-aware file service semantics, so that network-aware programs (multi-user databases, frex) work properly? - RL "Bob" Morgan Networking Systems Stanford