RFS vs. NFS

[Franklin Reynolds]

NFS has one significant advantage over RFS - it runs on lots
of different machines. This is important. However, RFS
(at least the specification of RFS) is technically superior
to NFS.

1. Unix file system semantics are preserved. This means
things like record locking and remote device access as
well as simple things open(), write(), unlink() work the
way you would like them to work.

2. The remote UID mapping stuff that NFS does is basically
useless. Remote superusers can impersonate anyone they
want which allows them to circumvent the NFS restrictions.
RFS allows you to controll *all* remote accesses.

3. NFS does not provide you with any way to have a location
indepentent view of the distributed file system. There is
Yellow Pages but they are best described as a small band-aid
applied to a gaping wound. RFS has a name server that seems 
to do a better job.

NFS seems obsolete to me. It was ok (though just barely) when 
it was introduced but it hasn't kept up with technology. These
days we should be able to have honest-to-gosh transparently networked
file systems. All this stuff about stateless file sytems being
nice and besides stateful file systems are hard is hooey. If other
people can do it, then Sun should be able to.

   Franklin Reynolds 
   fdr at ksr.uucp
   ksr!fdr at harvard.harvard.edu
   harvard!ksr!fdr

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