[TUHS] NFS aka the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines

[TUHS] NFS aka the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines

[Doug McIlroy]

Reputed origins of SVR4:

>  From SunOS:
> ...
> NFS

And, sadly, NFS is still with us, having somehow upstaged Peter
Weinberger's RFS (R for remote) that appeared at the same time.
NFS allows one to add computers to a file system, but not to
combine the file systems of multiple computers, as RFS did
by mapping uids: NFS:RFS::LAN:WAN.

Doug

[TUHS] NFS aka the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines

[Joerg Schilling]

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Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> And, sadly, NFS is still with us, having somehow upstaged Peter
> Weinberger's RFS (R for remote) that appeared at the same time.
> NFS allows one to add computers to a file system, but not to
> combine the file systems of multiple computers, as RFS did
> by mapping uids: NFS:RFS::LAN:WAN.

This changed long ago, NFSv4 no longer sends uid's but user names and supports 
mappings.

NFS won because it was not built on top of UNIX semantics and thus allowed to 
port it to other platforms.

The nice idea in RFS was that it supported remote devices, but the iotcl 
handling was a problem in AT&T UNIX before SVr4 ??? added a flag to tell 
whether the data source was in kernel or userland. I am not sure wether RFS 
had a concept like XDR for ioctls.

The funny thing: RFS was supported in SunOS4, but not in SunOS-5.

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.net                  (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
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[TUHS] NFS aka the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines

[Larry McVoy]

On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 10:40:03PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> The nice idea in RFS was that it supported remote devices, but the iotcl 
> handling was a problem in AT&T UNIX before SVr4 ??? added a flag to tell 
> whether the data source was in kernel or userland. I am not sure wether RFS 
> had a concept like XDR for ioctls.

I believe it did not.

> The funny thing: RFS was supported in SunOS4, but not in SunOS-5.

And Howard Chartok was ecstatic over that decision (he was my office
mate and did the port into SunOS 4.x.  Not one of his favorite projects.)

[TUHS] NFS aka the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines

[Steve Simon]

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Beware of confusion.

There is the 8th and 9th edition remote file protocol
(I have papers somewhere I think), by Weinberger.
This evolved into 9p, Plan9’s file protocol.

There is also RFS, I think a USG package for SYSVr3. The paper I have 
About this is by Author L Sabsevitz, though I don’t know if he was the author
of the code, or just the paper.

They are rather different beasts with similar names.

-Steve

> On 10 Jan 2017, at 21:43, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 10:40:03PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote:
>> The nice idea in RFS was that it supported remote devices, but the iotcl 
>> handling was a problem in AT&T UNIX before SVr4 ??? added a flag to tell 
>> whether the data source was in kernel or userland. I am not sure wether RFS 
>> had a concept like XDR for ioctls.
> 
> I believe it did not.
> 
>> The funny thing: RFS was supported in SunOS4, but not in SunOS-5.
> 
> And Howard Chartok was ecstatic over that decision (he was my office
> mate and did the port into SunOS 4.x.  Not one of his favorite projects.)

[TUHS] NFS aka the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines

[Mary Ann Horton]

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As I recall, RFS was implemented over virtual circuits, whereas NFS was 
over datagrams (UDP).  RFS was well suited to Datakit, which only did 
virtual circuits, and they often were used together inside Bell Labs.  
One of the reasons NFS won is that IP won over Datakit.


On 01/10/2017 04:56 PM, Steve Simon wrote:
> There is also RFS, I think a USG package for SYSVr3. The paper I have
> About this is by Author L Sabsevitz, though I don’t know if he was the author
> of the code, or just the paper.
>
>

[TUHS] NFS aka the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines

[Larry McVoy]

As a Sun guy it was obvious that NFS should win.  Sun ran all of
engineering on NFS, it actually worked and worked well.  When I left Sun
I found out that nobody did NFS anywhere as near as well as Sun did it.
At SGI NFS was a joke, we had senior engineers who said "don't trust
that, use rcp"  (looking at you Dave Olsen).  That was weird to me,
at Sun NFS just worked, as in you never thought about it not working.
Everywhere else it was so-so.

On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 07:17:20PM -0800, Mary Ann Horton wrote:
> As I recall, RFS was implemented over virtual circuits, whereas NFS was over
> datagrams (UDP).  RFS was well suited to Datakit, which only did virtual
> circuits, and they often were used together inside Bell Labs.  One of the
> reasons NFS won is that IP won over Datakit.
> 
> 
> On 01/10/2017 04:56 PM, Steve Simon wrote:
> >There is also RFS, I think a USG package for SYSVr3. The paper I have
> >About this is by Author L Sabsevitz, though I don???t know if he was the author
> >of the code, or just the paper.
> >
> >

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] NFS aka the guy who brought up SVr4 on Sun machines

[arnold]

Mary Ann Horton <mah at mhorton.net> wrote:

> As I recall, RFS was implemented over virtual circuits, whereas NFS was 
> over datagrams (UDP).  RFS was well suited to Datakit, which only did 
> virtual circuits, and they often were used together inside Bell Labs.  
> One of the reasons NFS won is that IP won over Datakit.

I think another reason is that AT&T got a lot more, er, "difficult"
about its licensing come SVR3, which introduced RFS. Many of the major
UNIX vendors (IBM, DEC, HP) didn't bother to license it. As most of them
already had NFS, it wasn't worth the trouble.

SunOS 4.0 had RFS. I think early versions of 4.1 did, but I'm pretty
sure that by 4.1.3 SunOS had removed it.

Arnold