Excerpts from transarc.external.info-afs: 12-Jan-95 Re: Special Devices
in AFS Marcus [EMAIL PROTECTED] (1231)
> Since it's true for Solaris, it's likely true of SGI and other SVR4
> variants, such as unixware. Since they seem unlikely to go away,
> and the same problem would likely exist in DFS (or might even
> be worse, since DFS allows you to export UFS as well as LFS), it's
> probably worth worrying about.
DFS supports special files. There's a per-volume (per-fileset) flag,
settable by root on the client, that says whether special files on the
server are to be interpreted as special files on the client machine. It
behooves the sysadmin who sets all this up to enable this flag on
clients only for filesets that contain special devices appropriate to
the architecture of the given client. That is, the major/minor numbers
vary a LOT between platforms, and DFS doesn't do any kind of translation.
That said, though, you can use DFS to store special files and have them
be interpreted correctly on a DFS client.
Craig
