diskless terms and NFS/alternatives (was Re: NFS alternative)
On Mon, Jul 16, 2001 at 01:43:34PM -0500, Dimitri Maziuk wrote:
| * D-Man (dsh8290@rit.edu) spake thusly:
| ...
| >
| > Now suppose just the right packets are lost and the RPC call ends up
| > matching a different, existant, procedure that doesn't have the
| > intended effect <grin> ... sounds like it would be a good idea to
| > make NFS over TCP stable :-).
|
| Well, RPC has its own error correction so if a right packet is
| lost it will be re-transmitted. Or RPC call will time out and
| return error (d'oh! remote RPC call. Automated ATM machine).
| The difference is that this is handled by application-level (if
| you consider RPC to be in application layer) code, not by transport
| layer.
|
| I imagine implementing NFS over TCP would involve a re-design of
| RPC state machine and a serious re-write of all related code, and
| it ain't exactly broken as it is, so... (given all the things that
| could [theoretically] go wrong with NFS, it is surprisingly stable).
Hmm, yeah, I guess that could be hard, unless the RPC mechanism could
use TCP. Or maybe a different RPC implementation could be used that
would work over TCP. Or maybe it isn't really a problem in practice
but just in theory.
| > Can I use NFS-root-over-TCP for one of the boxes (I'll have 2, the
| > other I'll leave at "regular" UDP as a "control" system)?
|
| There are other networked file systems out there, like Coda, more modern
| and arguably better than NFS. If you only need to support linux, why not
| use one of them? Or [e]nbd?
They're both going to be Debian. Can I use root-over-$FS for those
filesystems? Are they stable?
-D
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