RFS vs. NFS

[Larry Williamson]

In article <279 at prosun.first.gmd.de> Thomas Hoberg writes:
 > 
 > The flames I just read about ISC's NFS implementation have me wounder
 > why I should use NFS at all. [ ... ]  All we need is some 
 > kind of networking not necessarily NFS. Isn't there a thing called
 > RFS (AT&T's Remote File System) included with ISC? Shouldn't it 
 > actually perform a lot faster than the state-less design of NFS?

Yes, there is RFS. We've been using it with ISC 2.0.2 for about a
year. ISC implemented RFS on top of tcp/ip, so you need tcp/ip. 

The older version of ISC's tcp/ip was buggy to such an extent that it
was possible to crash a machine hourly if you used the network enough.
The latest release seems to have fixed the problems. 

RFS is nice, and it is awful.

RFS is fast. It feels much faster than NFS. The integration of RFS
into Sys V is almost seamless. A file system mounted with RFS is
almost indistinguishable from a local file system, file and record
locking work just nice, remote devices can be accessed this way, a
named pipe on an RFS file system can be used to communicate with a
process on another machine.

RFS is a not as nice to maintain. There are more parts. In an unstable
network it is a nighmare. I can't get clients to remount after a
server reboots with out manual intervention. If a client comes up or
tries to mount a file system that is on a server that is not
available, then you've got trouble. I played with secondary servers
for a while, but that seemed to cause more problems than it solved.

RFS will only work on machines that are System V. No MS-DOS, no VMS,
no BSD, etc, etc.

RFS is wonderful when it is running clean (as it is this week).

NFS is nice, and it is also awful.

NFS is not very fast. The integration of NFS into Sys V is clumsy.
Many functions do not work very well, or at all. Record locking does
not work, a lot of sloppy code that does directory processing by
opening the directory as a file rather than via the directory(3)
functions will not work (some shell's wildcard processing for
example). 

NFS is available for MS-DOS,if you have any dos users, they can mount
unix file systems.

NFS is easy to maintain. Actually it is childs play. 

RFS and NFS can be used together. All our System V machines run both.

Even with the admin headaches, I much prefer RFS when available.

-Larry