292 NFS Date: 19 Jul 89 19:51:45 GMT From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney) Subject: Re: NFS and Mac IIs Newsgroups: comp.protocols.nfs,comp.sys.mac2 It may be of interest to some people that TOPS, a Sun Microsystems company, was slated from the time of the acquisition by Sun to pro- duce a Macintosh NFS, and to replace its current product TOPS with this Macintosh NFS. Last year, this attempt was abandoned. There are simply too many technical obstacles to producing a good NFS client or server that is compatible with the Macintosh file system. The efficiency constraints imposed by the RPC model are one major problem the lack of flexibility of the NFS protocol is another. TOPS did negotiate with Sun over changes in the NFS protocol that would allow efficient operation with the Macintosh file system. However, these negotiations came to naught because of blocking on the Sun side. There never will be a good Macintosh NFS product without major changes to the NFS protocol. Those changes will not happen. I don’t mean to sound like a broken record here, but the fact is that NFS is not well suited to inter-operating-system environments. It works very well between Unix systems, tolerably well between Unix and the similarly ultra-simple MS-DOS file system. It does not work well when there is a complex file system like Macintosh or VMS involved. It can be made to work, but only with a great deal of diffi- culty and a very user-visible performance penalty. The supposedly inter-OS nature of NFS is a fabrication (albeit a sincere one) of starry-eyed Sun engineers this aspect of the protocol was announced long before even a single non-UNIX implementation was done. Tim Maroney, Mac Software Consultant, tim@toad.com Virtual File Corruption What’s better than a networked file system that corrupts your files? A file system that doesn’t really corrupt them, but only makes them appear as if they are corrupted. NFS does this from time to time. 2Forwarded to UNIX-HATERS by Richard Mlynarik with the comment “Many people (but not Famous Net Personalities) have known this for years.”

Not File System Specific? (Not Quite) 293 Date: Fri, 5 Jan 90 14:01:05 EST From: curt@ai.mit.edu (Curtis Fennell)3 Subject: Re: NFS Problems To: all-ai@ai.mit.edu As most of you know, we have been having problems with NFS because of a bug in the operating system on the Suns. This bug makes it appear that NFS mounted files have been trashed, when, in fact, they are OK. We have taken the recommended steps to correct this problem, but until Sun gets us a fix, it will reoccur occasionally. The symptoms of this problem are: When you go to log in or to access a file, it looks as though the file is garbage or is a completely different file. It may also affect your .login file(s) so that when you log in, you see a different prompt or get an error message to the effect that you have no login files/ directory. This is because the system has loaded an incorrect file pointer across the net. Your original file probably is still OK, but it looks bad. If this happens to you, the first thing to do is to check the file on the server to see if is OK on the server. You can do this by logging directly into the server that your files are on and looking at the files. If you discover that your files are trashed locally, but not on the server, all you have to do is to log out locally and try again. Things should be OK after you’ve logged in again. DO NOT try to remove or erase the trashed files locally. You may accidentally trash the good files on the server. REMEMBER, this problem only makes it appear as if your files have been trashed it does not actually trash your files. We should have a fix soon in the meantime, try the steps I’ve recom- mended. If these things don’t work or if you have some questions, feel free to ask me for help anytime. —Curt 3Forwarded to UNIX-HATERS by David Chapman.