13 Aug
2025
13 Aug
'25
5:08 p.m.
Douglas McIlroy writes:
I was always sorry that Peter Weinberger's RFS
never made it outside
Bell Labs. It allowed networking between separately administered
systems by mapping UIDs.
My experience with (SVR3) RFS can be summed up in two words:
stateful, and brittle
We ran RFS on a "cluster" of four 3B2s, and while it worked, to
varying degrees, the statefulness of the protocol inevitably led
to the whole thing locking up, requiring a reboot of all four
machines to recover. This was especially problematic when we
accessed the one 9-track drive over RFS when attempting backups.
I eventually gave up on it, and hauled out the Lachman NFS source
tape and got NFS running on all the machines. Life was much happier
afterwards.
I do not miss RFS.
--lyndon