Symlinks vs. NFS

[Barry Margolin]

In article <2378 at quacky.mips.COM> dce at quacky.UUCP (David Elliott) writes:
>So, as a first shot, I'd like to suggest that there be a modification
>to symlinks that a special leading symbol mean 'root of the machine
>on which this file resides'.  For the sake of starting some discussion,
>I'll suggest '...', though I realize that there may be conflicts.

What if you don't have the remote machine's root mounted?

Also, even if you do have the remote machine's root mounted, there is
no way for the local machine to know that, since there is nothing in
the NFS protocol that allows a client to find out if a particular
directory is the remote machine's root directory.  Don't say that if
the remote mount is for "machinename:/" it is the root; this only
works if the remote machine is a Unix system, but NFS is not supposed
to be Unix specific.  In particular, we have the following entry in
our /etc/fstab:

aquinas:> /lispm/aquinas  nfs  ...

This is the entry for a Symbolics Lisp Machine running an NFS server;
these machines use ">" where Unix uses "/".  Thus, the above
represent's Aquinas's root directory, but there's no standard way for
the client to determine that.

I'm not crazy about the NFS protocol, but I'm not about to propose any
changes to it.  Given the protocol as it stands, the problems with
links are inherent.

Barry Margolin
Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar at think.com
uunet!think!barmar