> One thing that NFS does very well is recover from server failures. All > other file sharing protocols that I have seen tend to cause all the > clients to fail when the server fails. This feature is the main reason > that NFS prevailed over other methods. Recovering from a server failure > was important in the early 80s when NFS was invented because servers would > crash a couple of times a week.
Week? Day. 8-) NFS v2 handled that well (that's what stateless datagram-oriented protocols are good at), but the introduction of NFS over TCP in v3 broke some of that resilience. When you lost the state of the TCP connection, it created a whole new set of interesting failure modes that had to get resolved by new NFS RPCs. That's one of the things I really don't like about NFS v4. It depends on a reliable network, much more than before, and there's a lot more state to invalidate if something does go wrong. NFS v4 over IPv6 is a real horror -- you'd think you were setting up SNA sessions or something given all the layers. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
