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

[Joerg Schilling]

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

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