ugh.book

292 NFS

Date: 19 Jul 89 19:51:45 GMT

From: [email protected] (Tim Maroney)

Subject: Re: NFS and Mac IIs

Newsgroups: comp.protocols.nfs,comp.sys.mac^2

It may be of interest to some people that TOPS, a Sun Microsystems

company, was slated from the time of the acquisition by Sun to pro-

duce a Macintosh NFS, and to replace its current product TOPS with

this Macintosh NFS. Last year, this attempt was abandoned. There

are simply too many technical obstacles to producing a good NFS

client or server that is compatible with the Macintosh file system.

The efficiency constraints imposed by the RPC model are one major

problem; the lack of flexibility of the NFS protocol is another.

TOPS did negotiate with Sun over changes in the NFS protocol that

would allow efficient operation with the Macintosh file system.

However, these negotiations came to naught because of blocking on

the Sun side.

There never will be a good Macintosh NFS product without major

changes to the NFS protocol. Those changes will not happen.

I don’t mean to sound like a broken record here, but the fact is that

NFS is not well suited to inter-operating-system environments. It

works very well between Unix systems, tolerably well between Unix

and the similarly ultra-simple MS-DOS file system. It does not work

well when there is a complex file system like Macintosh or VMS

involved. It can be made to work, but only with a great deal of diffi-

culty and a very user-visible performance penalty. The supposedly

inter-OS nature of NFS is a fabrication (albeit a sincere one) of

starry-eyed Sun engineers; this aspect of the protocol was announced

long before even a single non-UNIX implementation was done.

Tim Maroney, Mac Software Consultant, [email protected]

Virtual File Corruption

What’s better than a networked file system that corrupts your files? A file

system that doesn’t really corrupt them, but only makes them appear as if

they are corrupted. NFS does this from time to time.

(^2) Forwarded to UNIX-HATERS by Richard Mlynarik with the comment “Many
people (but not Famous Net Personalities) have known this for years.”