"Chris G. Demetriou" writes...
/*
 * > So, the behavior for an UFS file system and a NFS one should be the same, i
 * > think.
 * 
 * Note even close.  UFS defines a certain set of semantics, which it
 * follows.  NFS defines a different set (and for things like this,
 * follows the server's idea of what's right).
 * 
 * You can't say "it works this way on UFS, so it should work this way
 * on NFS" -- that's just not the way it works.

[ I realise most of us know what NFS does and I apologise if this wasted
  too much bandwidth.  I think I understand what happens, more or less;
  may I clarify for those who are even fuzzier on this than I am? ]

For those who are unclear on NFS (forgive the redundancy of the following
thought):

Chris is right on the money here.  If you're a NetBSD machine and you're
mounting a SunOS filesystem NFS, the interactions follow those of the
fileserver.  When you do transactions on a NFS, the vn subsystem just
throws RPC calls at the server, and it's up to the server to handle the
calls.  If you do NetBSD-NetBSD, you will find that the NFS semantics
and the UFS semantics are identical; but SunOS/SVR4/SVR3/SVR2(Yuck!)
will all do something different (and yes there are implementations of
SVR{2,3} with NFS built in -- I worked on one), i.e. if you say
"mkdir(path, mode)", the kernel goes to (vn_ops)->vn_mkdir(path,mode)
and eventually ends up passing an RPC(NFS_MKDIR, PATH, MODE) to the
server [ these names are almost certainly wrong, but I think the general
procedure is correct, barring locking and error checking for brevity ].
The server then LOCALLY translates the mount and calls mkdir(new_path,mode),
not caring what kind of OS the request came from.

 * cgd
 */
[ End of excerpt from cgd@postgres.berkeley.edu ("Chris G. Demetriou") ]




Make a hacker happy.  Use a *real* OS.
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