Just how reliable is NFS?

[Nathaniel Mishkin]

Just an anecdote, not a comment on the reliability of NFS:

For people who think that the swell checksumming that your favorite
Ethernet board does for you, think again:  I once had an Interlan
controller whose on-board packet buffer memory went flakey.  So the bits
coming off the wire were appropriately checksummed and passed, and then
trashed on the board and passed up to some unwitting Chaosnet software
(which, unlike the IP model, doesn't do checksumming) and on up to an
FTP program which happily wrote the wrong bit to a file.

Moral of the story:  Do end-to-end checksumming.

                -- Nat Mishkin
                   Apollo Computer Inc.
                   {mit-eddie, wanginst, yale}!apollo!mishkin