[TUHS] Re: RFS (was Re: Re: forgotten versions)

[George Michaelson <ggm@algebras.org>]

I probably tend too much to the sociological more than technical in
this, but I do know we were very prejudiced against RFS. Very. We just
didn't like it.

Probably? This was some kind of bizarre chauvinism about NFS and Suns,
and access to the systems. But, my memory is that RFS as available to
us was not very easy to deploy, and may have been by default a "hard"
mount just at the point we were finding the benefit of having a "soft"
mount, in experience. Sure, a soft mount is significantly less
reliable, but with unreliable campus networks and systems, half a
usable system is better than none at all, and RFS tended to 'all or
nothing'

This was during the window where Sun was breaking the UDP checksum,
and also Ethernet backoff. So, its UDP checksum gaming meant it was
"faster" because it did less work, and its Ethernet backoff gaming
meant it was always first-to-fire in a contention event on the cable.
Two cheats! I don't think RFS did either, so there was also specious
benchmarking coming into effect,

-G