Just how reliable is NFS?

[aglew at ccvaxa.UUCP]

> Particularly when the "application" is something like NFS, which could make
> an incredible mess if packets got garbled, there is something to be said
> for such "end-to-end" error checking.
>  
> 				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology

I seem to recall a paper in _Computer Networks_ about a year and a half ago
that made a rather convincing case for end-to-end error checking. It's
really obvious when you think about it - error checking in lower level
protocols can really do nothing for your confidence level in upper level
protocols, because the criteria they use to evaluate an acceptable rate
of errors may be entirely different from your own.

In fact, the authors went on to suggest that it always be possible to turn
lower level error checking off, as a performance enhancement, since the
upper level protocol *should* do it anyway.

Of course, this is an environment where communications engineers calculate
acceptable error rates. Do we do that in computers, hmmm ;-) ?

Andy "Krazy" Glew. Gould CSD-Urbana.    USEnet:  ihnp4!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!aglew
1101 E. University, Urbana, IL 61801    ARPAnet: aglew at gswd-vms