NFS, RFS and the meaning of life

[Barry Shein]

Are there people out there actually running RFS who would like to
comment on it? Everything said so far makes RFS sound so hypothetical.
Particularly outside of AT&T and even more particularly anyone with
experience with NFS also although I for one would appreciate anyone's
views from a practiced standpoint.

Also, re Doug Gwyn's question about "is yp_ a necessary part of NFS?"

I don't see why it should be, the Yellow Pages is a way to distribute
network (and other) database queries allowing multiple servers and
clients layered on RPC. Current implementations of NFS might use YP
for these functions but I can't see why gethostbyname() or similar
calls couldn't just be done 'the old fashioned way' (grovel through a
local and probably out of date and inconsistent /etc/hosts file...)

Why such a negative reaction to it Doug? It seems like a needed
service, obviously not if you have one machine which is the center of
your world (maybe that's how you see your Gould?) but in an
environment like ours I'd sure hate to try to keep a few dozen
/etc/hosts files et alia up to date (and growing.)

Does RFS/SYSVR3 have any way to share network databases?

	-Barry Shein, Boston University