mjr@hussar.dco.dec.com (Marcus J. Ranum) (02/27/91)
>>And to Unix users, NFS is not stateless. What is rpc.lockd used for? > >Whew! Where did this come from? NFS is stateless. The locking gunk is >and has been a problematic aspect for some time. Indeed, one is tempted to point to the "locking gunk" and how problematic it is - that should be an indicator of how hard getting remote device states to work properly would be. Devices aren't stateless. Locks are stateful. Devices are stateful. It's a whole different kettle of fish. NFS works terrifically well for what it is intended to do. It was not intended as a solution for the distributed database problem, and if it had been, people would either a) still be writing it or b) complaining a lot about how slow it is. mjr.