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

[Norman Wilson]

I don't know the exact history of RFS a la System V, but I
don't think it was Peter Weinberger's stuff, and it certainly
wasn't his code.  Nor his name: he called his first version
neta and his second netb (he knew it would be changing and
allowed for it in the name from the start).

I don't remember us ever calling it RFS, or even remote
file systems, inside 1127; we called it network file systems
(never NFS because the Sun stuff existed by then).

For those who don't know it, Peter's goal was quite different
from that of NFS.  The idea behind NFS seems always to have
been to mount a remote file system as if it were local, with
a base assumption early on that everything was within the
same administrative domain so it was OK to make assumptions
about userids matching up, and running code as super-user.
Peter described his intent as `I want to be able to use your
disks, and that's a lot simpler if I don't have to get you
to add code to your kernel, or even to run a program as
super-user.'  Hence the entirely-user-mode server program,
which could use super-user privileges to afford access as
any user if it had them, but also worked fine when run as
an ordinary user with only that user's file permissions.
We did in fact normally run it as super-user so each of
our 15 or so VAXes could see the file system tree on each
other, but we also occasionally did it otherwise.

That was one reason device files worked as they did, accessing
the device on the server end rather than acting like a local
special file on the client: we didn't care about running
diskless clients, but we did occasionally care about accessing
a remote system's tape drive.

Peter, being a self-described fan of cheap hacks, also wasn't
inclined to spend much time thinking about general abstractions;
in effect he just turned various existing kernel subroutines
(when applied to a network file system) into RPCs.  The
structure of the file system switch was rather UNIX-specific,
reflecting that.

That also means Peter's code was a bit ad-hoc and wonky in
places.  He cleaned it up considerably between neta and netb,
and I did further cleanup later.  I even had a go at a library
to isolate the network protocol from the server proper, converted
the netb server to use it, and made a few demo servers of my own
like one to read and write raw FILES-11 file systems--useful for
working with the console file system on the VAX 8800 series,
which was exported to the host as a block device--and a daemon
to allow a tar archive to be mounted as a read-only file system.

In modern systems, you can do the same sort of things with FUSE,
and set up the same I-want-to-use-your-disks (or I want to get
at my own files from afar without privileges) scheme with sshfs.
I would be very surprised to learn that either of those borrowed
from their ancient cousins in Research UNIX; so far as I know
they're independent inventions.  Either way I'm glad they exist.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON