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From: bob@uhccux.UUCP (Bob Cunningham)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans,comp.sources.wanted
Subject: Re: NFS availability
Message-ID: <671@uhccux.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 9-Jul-87 12:54:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: uhccux.671
Posted: Thu Jul  9 12:54:51 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 12-Jul-87 06:23:36 EDT
References: <272@wapsyvax.OZ> <1721@umn-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: bob@uhccux.UUCP (Bob Cunningham)
Organization: U. of Hawaii, Manoa (Honolulu)
Lines: 43
Keywords: Sun NFS PC
Xref: mnetor comp.dcom.lans:620 comp.sources.wanted:1564

The Sun NFS for PCs does indeed work, and---in my opinion---very well.

My otherwise vanilla IBM XT with its 3COM Etherlink card and Sun NFS
software mounts several disk partitions and directories which
physically reside on several Suns and our Alliant FX/8 which also
supports NFS.

For almost all intents and purposes, the PC treats these exactly
as if they were disk drives physically attached to the PC.  I've
simply copied Lotus and other applications to those disks and
run them in the normal ways.  I also backup the XT's own hard
disk to an NFS-mounted disk.

However, note that the MSDOS file format is different than the
Unix file format.  In particular, MSDOS files have a carriage
return (\r) preceeding each newline.  The "dos2unix" and
"unix2dos" comand filters fix that when required.

The commands and utilities that don't work on NFS files are

	CHKDSK, DISKCOMP, DISKCOPY, FDISK, FORMAT,
	JOIN (doable slightly differently), LABEL,
	PRINT (doable slightly differently), RECOVER,
	SUBST, and SYST

NU and similar disk-structure dependent programs probably don't
work either.

DIR works as expected, and also tells you what system the disk
is exported from.

The NSF-supplied comands include

	ARP, CHMOD, DOS2UNIX, LPCONFIG, LS, MV, NET, NETSTAT,
	NFSPING, NFSSTAT, RPCINFO, SHOWMNT, UNIX2DOS, YPCAT,
	and YPMATCH

The NET command has a variety of flavors, including NET PRINT
and others for general administration (mounting, unmounting)
of NFS on a PC.

Also bundled with the current version is a TELNET command with
nominal vt100 emulation for the PC (requires ANSI.SYS).