affordable source for NFS on 4.3BSD?

[Dave Martindale]

My situation: Most of our disk space (1.5Gb) is on a VAX running 4.2BSD
(soon to be 4.3).  We have three Silicon Graphics IRIS workstations
with small disks, and currently people move files between the
workstations and the VAX explicitly (via rcp).  Programs that wish to
read or write files that are larger than the free space on the IRIS
cannot be run at all.

We badly need a network filesystem of some sort, both to make life
simpler for people working on the IRISes, and to enable programs on the
IRIS to deal with files larger than the available local storage.

In about a month, Sun Microsystems' NFS becomes available on the IRIS
for $2K US each, a manageable price.  Now I need NFS for the VAX.  (We
can't use the public-domain RFS since the IRISes are binary licenced).


Mt. Xinu offers 4.3BSD plus NFS for the VAX for $13K US in source
form.  Unfortunately, they require a SysV Rel2 licence, and we have
only SysV Rel1.  The total cost for upgrading our SV licence plus the
Mt. Xinu code is prohibitive for us.  (We are classed as a "commercial"
site, but we aren't a money-making organization, so that sort of money
is hard to find.)

Mt. Xinu also offers NFS source alone for $10K; the SVR2 licence is
still required, so the $3K saving doesn't help much.

Sun Microsystems themselves offers NFS source for 4.2BSD (4.3BSD
"soon") for $25K US for the first CPU.  This is equally prohibitive for
us.

So, are there any alternatives for us?  Or should we just give up on
NFS for now and hope that prices eventually drop?

A public-domain or cheap NFS implementation for 4.2/4.3 that worked
would be great.  An implementation of NFS that cost $5K or even $10K
and didn't need a SVR2 licence would also be workable.

I believe that a binary version of NFS for 4.3 would be usable as a
last resort, but difficult to deal with since other things need to
remain in source form - we can't use a binary-only 4.3BSD.

I will summarize any responses I receive; you need not post to the
net.

	Dave Martindale
	{musocs,micomvax,watmath}!onfcanim!dave