Not File System Specific? (Not Quite) 291 The Sun kernel has a user-patchable cosmology. It contains a poly- theism bit called “nobody.” When network file requests come in from root (i.e., God), it maps them to be requests from the value of the kernel variable “nobody” which as distributed is set to -1 which by convention corresponds to no user whatsoever, rather than to 0, the binary representation of God (*). The default corresponds to a basically Greek pantheon in which there are many Gods and they’re all trying to screw each other (both literally and figuratively in the Greek case). However, by using adb to set the kernel variable “nobody” to 0 in the divine boot image, you can move to a Ba’hai cosmology in which all Gods are really manifestations of the One Root God, Zero, thus inventing monotheism. Thus when the manifestation of the divine spirit, binmail, attempts to create a mailbox on a remote server on a monotheistic Unix, it will be able to invoke the divine change-owner command so as to make it profane enough for you to touch it without spontaneously combust- ing and having your eternal soul damned to hell. On a polytheistic Unix, the divine binmail isn’t divine so your mail file gets created by “nobody” and when binmail invokes the divine change-owner com- mand, it is returned an error code which it forgets to check, knowing that it is, in fact, infallible. So, patch the kernel on the file server or run sendmail on the server. -ian ————————————————————— (*) That God has a binary representation is just another clear indica- tion that Unix is extremely cabalistic and was probably written by disciples of Aleister Crowley. Not File System Specific? (Not Quite) The NFS designers thought that they were designing a networked file sys- tem that could work with computers running operating systems other than Unix, and work with file systems other than the Unix file system. Unfortu- nately, they didn’t try to verify this belief before they shipped their initial implementation, thus establishing the protocol as an unchangeable stan- dard. Today we are stuck with it. Although it is true that NFS servers and clients have been written for microcomputers like DOS PCs and Macin- toshes, it’s also true that none of them work well.
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.”