From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Jan 27 07:38:10 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id HAA10460 for questions-outgoing; Mon, 27 Jan 1997 07:38:10 -0800 (PST) Received: from aixrs1.hrz.uni-essen.de (mail.uni-essen.de [132.252.180.234]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id HAA10453 for ; Mon, 27 Jan 1997 07:38:04 -0800 (PST) Received: from icemserv-gw.folkwang.uni-essen.de by aixrs1.hrz.uni-essen.de (AIX 4.1/UCB 5.64/4.03) id AA37496; Mon, 27 Jan 1997 16:37:50 +0100 Received: (from neuhaus@localhost) by icemserv.folkwang.uni-essen.de (8.7.5/8.7.3) id QAA26163 for freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; Mon, 27 Jan 1997 16:36:27 +0100 (MET) From: Thomas Neuhaus Message-Id: <199701271536.QAA26163@icemserv.folkwang.uni-essen.de> Subject: NFS locking To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org (bsd-question) Date: Mon, 27 Jan 1997 16:36:27 +0100 (MET) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL22 (25)] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Hello, this question might seem stupid as it contains already half of the answer, but anyhow, maybe someone's got a good idea... We run a FreeBSD machine at our side as a file- mail- everything server, the (unix) - clients however are SGI Indys. Our former fileserver was a (dare I say it) A/UX machine which means it was some kind of SVR3. What was nice with the old server was, that it was possible to symply export /var/mail and everyone was happily reading and writing mail using his preferred mail-reader on his preferred machine. Big surprise that was when I tried the same with the BSD Server! The SGIs took an awful lot of time to boot, fancy error messaged like "Can't contact fam server" and starting a Mail client kept it stuck for a while and then giving up with something like "cant lock mail folder". The reason seemed to be that the SGIs wanted to talk to the lockd to put a lock on the respective files on the server which wasn't possible, because there was no such daemon. Reading literature (the o'Reilly Book on NFS and NIS) made me discover that locking in BSD is only defined for local files, so there is no need for a lockd/statd pair in FreeBSD. OK. But what do you do if you want to serve SYSV clients? Here everybody reads email now on the server using elm and pine. But there might still be programs trying to lock files in users' homedirectories which couldnt work (I know at least one) So here are my (obvious) questions: Did anybody in a similar situation find an elegent solution? Is it possible (and if so is it planned) to port lockd/statd to FreeBSD thus implementing SYSV-locking semantics or would that be too much against the BSD-way to do things? Thanks in advance Thomas -- Thomas Neuhaus(neuhaus@folkwang.uni-essen.de) Phone (49)-201-4903-333 ICEM Institut fuer Computermusik und elektronische Medien Folkwang-Hochschule Essen, Klemensborn 39, D-49239 Essen -------------------------------------------------------------------------------