NFS kludges?

[Marcus J. Ranum]

>>And to Unix users, NFS is not stateless. What is rpc.lockd used for?
>
>Whew!  Where did this come from?  NFS is stateless.  The locking gunk is
>and has been a problematic aspect for some time.

	Indeed, one is tempted to point to the "locking gunk" and how
problematic it is - that should be an indicator of how hard getting
remote device states to work properly would be. Devices aren't stateless.
Locks are stateful. Devices are stateful. It's a whole different kettle
of fish.

	NFS works terrifically well for what it is intended to do. It was
not intended as a solution for the distributed database problem, and if it
had been, people would either a) still be writing it or b) complaining a
lot about how slow it is.

mjr.