Several questions

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <1316 at blake.acs.washington.edu> icsu6000 at caesar.cs.montana.edu (Jaye Mathisen) writes:
>1)  NFS is supposed to be a "stateless" protocol.  What good is a stateless
>protocol that requires  a whole schmeer of stateful servers to  provide
>"most" of the semantics of the Unix file system?

By not having to propagate revised state information around to all users
of a file whenever any one of them makes a change, supposedly efficiency
is improved.  Also, core NFS deliberately lacks some UNIX file system
semantics to make it compatible with non-UNIX file systems, MS-DOS in
particular.

In a UNIX environment, I agree with your implication that the RFS
(stateful) approach is generally better.  I especially like RFS's
preservation of device driver semantics across multiple hops.  I never
did hear how AT&T was going to solve the problem of ioctl data format
incompatibility among heterogeneous systems, though.