[TUHS] RFS (was Re: Re: forgotten versions)

[Brad Spencer]

Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> writes:

> On Sun, Jun 19, 2022 at 09:46:31PM +0100, Derek Fawcus wrote:
>> On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 10:00:19PM -0700, Kevin Bowling wrote:
>> > On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 5:35 PM Douglas McIlroy douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>> > >
>> > > V8 also had Peter Weinberger's Remote File System. Unlike NFS, RFS
>> > > mapped UIDS, thus allowing files to be shared among computers in
>> > > different jurisdictions with different UID lists. Unfortunately, RFS
>> > > went the way of Reiser paging.
>> > 
>> > I believe RFS shipped in SVR3, at least as a package for the 3b2.
>> 
>> Apparently. I've a book (ISBN 0-672-48440-4) with a short chapter on it within, authored by Douglas Harris.
>> 
>> It happens to state:
>> 
>>   AT&T's approach towards UNIX System V, Release 3.0 and beyond is to provide a /Remote File System/ (RFS) that is an extension of the ordinary file system arrangement. [???]
>
> SunOS 4.x shipped RFS, Howard Chartok (my office mate at the time) did
> the port I believe.  Thankless work since Sun ran their entire campus
> on NFS; RFS never got any attention.  It's too bad because it did solve
> some problems that NFS just punted on.  NFS is Clem's law in action,
> it was good enough, not great, but still won.




I remember SunOS 4.x having RFS..  I never used it but I vaguely recall
(probably misremembering) that there was a warning in the man page about
it that it might not interoperate with /dev devices correct if the byte
order of the machines was different.  I seem to recall that with RFS if
/dev was remoted you actually accessed the remote devices and not just
the device nodes from the system that /dev was mounted to.  At the AT&T
site I was at we used NFS exclusively too.



-- 
Brad Spencer - brad at anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org