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

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 11:19:49PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 05:39:54PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > It's important to note, when talking about NFS, that there was Sun's NFS
> > and everyone else's NFS.  Sun ran their entire company on NFS.  /usr/dist
> > was where all the software that was not part of SunOS lived, it was an
> > NFS mounted volume (that was replicated to each subnet).  It was heavily
> > used as were a lot of other things.  The automounter at Sun just worked,
> > wanted to see your buddies stuff?  You just cd-ed to it and it worked.
> 
> So the story that went around MIT Project Athena was that there was
> Sun's NFS, and then there was the version which Sun gave way for
> others to use, which was a clean-room re-implementation by a
> relatively junior engineer.  Which is why when a file was truncated
> and then rewritten, and "truncate this file" packet got reordered and
> got received after the "here's the new 4k of contents of the file",
> Hilarty Enused.

No, the problem was that people didn't understand open to close
semantics.  Sun was actually an engineering organization that took
the rules seriously.   You know, stuff like sync writes actually
need being sync in order to get the semantics right.