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Date: Sun, 20 Aug 1995 22:45:50 -0500
From: Peter da Silva <peter@bonkers.taronga.com>
Message-Id: <199508210345.WAA29762@bonkers.taronga.com>
To: terry@cs.weber.edu
Subject: Re: Making a FreeBSD NFS server
Newsgroups: taronga.freebsd.hackers
In-Reply-To: <9508201948.AA23045@cs.weber.edu>
References: <Pine.BSI.3.91.950820150733.17751w-100000@aries>
Organization: Taronga Park BBS
Cc: hackers@freebsd.org
Sender: hackers-owner@freebsd.org
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In article <9508201948.AA23045@cs.weber.edu>,
Terry Lambert <terry@cs.weber.edu> wrote:
>Unless you are running everything on the same box, it's impossible to
>provide inter-machine consistency guarantees.  That's why NFS is the
>way it is.

Oh, crap. You handle machine failures the same way you handle disk failures.
If you can't handle disk failures you shouldn't have a stateful *local* file
system. For conventional file I/O you can get pretty much the same recovery
semantics both ways (client reloads state), and for non-file I/O you get the
choice of no access at all or error returns. I'll take the error returns.

I've used stateless and stateful remote file systems, and I'll take stateful
any day. I'd much rather type:

	tar tvfB //xds13/dev/rmt0

Than:

	rsh xds13 dd if=/dev/rmt0 | tar tvfb -

And it's awful nice to be able to set up a getty on //modem1/dev/ttyc4. And
being able to get open-count semantics on temp files. And accessing named
pipes over the net. And "fsck //hurtsystem/dev/rw0a". And so on...

I really miss OpenNET.