[TUHS] RFS

[Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM)]

Douglas McIlroy writes:
> I was always sorry that Peter Weinberger's RFS never made it outside
> Bell Labs. It allowed networking between separately administered
> systems by mapping UIDs.

My experience with (SVR3) RFS can be summed up in two words:

	stateful, and brittle

We ran RFS on a "cluster" of four 3B2s, and while it worked, to
varying degrees, the statefulness of the protocol inevitably led
to the whole thing locking up, requiring a reboot of all four
machines to recover.  This was especially problematic when we
accessed the one 9-track drive over RFS when attempting backups.

I eventually gave up on it, and hauled out the Lachman NFS source
tape and got NFS running on all the machines.  Life was much happier
afterwards.

I do not miss RFS.

--lyndon