16 May
2024
16 May
'24
8:03 p.m.
On Thu, May 16, 2024 at 09:45:38AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
On Thu, May 16, 2024 at 7:51???AM John Cowan
<cowan(a)ccil.org> wrote:
If you are all trusting, behind a firewall, like the Sun campus was:
diff /net/host1/file /net/host2/file
Seems pretty darn similar and you don't set up a namespace other than
saying what you want to share in /etc/exports.
Seems far from creaky to me, no root access required (other than setting
up /etc/exports), any user can access any exported file. I was at Sun
and it worked great. Granted, you needed a working NFS implementation
and when I left Sun I found that Sun was really the only place that got
that right in the 1990's. Linux has caught up, don't know about the
rest.
--lm
[snip]
This appears to be a VHS vs. Betamax battle: NFS was not transparent, but Sun had far
more marketing clout. However, the Manchester Connection required a single uid space (as
far as I can tell), which may also have been a (perceived) institutional barrier.
So did NFS, for that matter.
This is one of those areas where Unix appears creaky in comparison to
Plan 9. `ssh` is all about remote access to resources, whereas plan 9
was all about resource sharing: you'd set up a namespace with all of
the resources (exposed as files from wherever they ultimately came
from) you cared about, and then operate on those "locally"; the
resources were shared with you and access was transparent, via a
consistent, file-based interface. You want to `diff` two remote files?
Import the filesystems they're both on, mount those somewhere, and
`diff /n/host1/file /n/host2/file`.