28 Sep
2017
28 Sep
'17
5:13 a.m.
I guess alternatively, what was interesting or neat, about RFS, if
anything? And what was bad?
On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 4:11 PM, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 7:01 PM, Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling(a)kev009.com>
wrote:
What were the market forces or limitations that led to NFS prevailing?
Sun pretty much gave it away. It was simple and 'good enough.'
The Issue was it not a real UNIX file system and did not support full UNIX
semantics. For a lot of things (like program development) that was usually
ok. It also exposed a lot a issues in user code - things like programs that
never bothered to check for errors returns (like fclose).
So bad things happened for a long time in a lot of code (silent holes in
your SCCS files that did get detected until months later).
But to Sun and NFS's credit, it solved a problem that was there and was
cheap and so folks used it.
Clem