28 Sep
2017
28 Sep
'17
5:19 a.m.
On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 05:39:54PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
It's important to note, when talking about NFS,
that there was Sun's NFS
and everyone else's NFS. Sun ran their entire company on NFS. /usr/dist
was where all the software that was not part of SunOS lived, it was an
NFS mounted volume (that was replicated to each subnet). It was heavily
used as were a lot of other things. The automounter at Sun just worked,
wanted to see your buddies stuff? You just cd-ed to it and it worked.
So the story that went around MIT Project Athena was that there was
Sun's NFS, and then there was the version which Sun gave way for
others to use, which was a clean-room re-implementation by a
relatively junior engineer. Which is why when a file was truncated
and then rewritten, and "truncate this file" packet got reordered and
got received after the "here's the new 4k of contents of the file",
Hilarty Enused.
I'm pretty sure the last part was true, because we debugged it at MIT.
Does anyone know if the bit of the "open source" version of NFS being
a crappy reimplementation which Sun "gifted" to the rest of the
industry was true or not?
- Ted