[TUHS] RFS was: Re: UNIX of choice these days?

[Kevin Bowling]

I guess alternatively, what was interesting or neat, about RFS, if
anything?  And what was bad?

On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 4:11 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 7:01 PM, Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling at kev009.com>
> wrote:
>>
>>
>> What were the market forces or limitations that led to NFS prevailing?
>
> Sun pretty much gave it away.   It was simple and 'good enough.'
>
> The Issue was it not a real UNIX file system and did not support full UNIX
> semantics.   For a lot of things (like program development) that was usually
> ok.  It also exposed a lot a issues in user code - things like programs that
> never bothered to check for errors returns (like fclose).
>
> So bad things happened for a long time in a lot of code (silent holes in
> your SCCS files that did get detected until months later).
>
> But to Sun and NFS's credit, it solved a problem that was there and was
> cheap and so folks used it.
>
> Clem