Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!uw-june!uw-entropy!dataio!pilchuck!ssc!apcisea!chinn
From: chinn@apciseaapcisea.UUCP (3C3AF053.B0012B28)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: Apollo's NFS !!
Summary: some more comments on nfs
Message-ID: <155@apcisea.UUCP>
Date: 28 Jun 88 19:47:53 GMT
References: <4646@vdsvax.steinmetz.ge.com> <2027@ssc-vax.UUCP>
Organization: apollo
Lines: 52

In article <2027@ssc-vax.UUCP>, benoni@ssc-vax.UUCP (Charles L Ditzel) writes:

> Since my initial posting I have seen a demo of Apollo NFS and it seems like 

You mean you've been flaming us all this time and you hadn't even seen the
product yet !!! :-).

> there is a glimmer of hope.  As to the question about WHY one would want
> to run NFS between two Apollos -
> 	Say you have two seperate domain rings with ethernet 
> 	connecting them and a multitude of other machines...

you mean like they have in chelmsford; where the corporate net has in
excess of 2000 nodes hooked together.  Where the primarily manufacturing nets 
(rings ethers, etc) are ether'd to all the other nets for R&D, marketing, sales,
and whatever else (which are also rings, ethers, etc) back
in Massachusetts.

> 	remote machines seems not only plausible but extremely
> 	useful...I know of occurances where NFS machines talking

useful is a relative term. Certainly you can get the NFS functionality 
required, (if you want), but most people want to use things like the single
name space, display manager capabilities and etc, even on the nodes which are
physically far away from each other.

This can, of course be done using internets.  And please don't tell me you don't 
like it cause it is different; how many products have you ever developed in which
you made absolutely no design decisions to tradeoff commonality for functionality?
And ether bridge is something like 3 commands and no configuration files to edit.
(One could argue that it is easier than setting up NFS on a Sun.)  And the product
does not exclude using NFS between your suns and vaxen that you have connected
to your ether. Or between your xyz machines and apollos on a ring, ether, t1 or etc.

On the subject of mapping files; perhaps the compilers/loaders could be modified
to recognize when to map, and when to handle the object as a byte stream; I'm not
sure and am in the process of asking someone.  However, to say that apollo is the
only company that has this particular problem is patently untrue; it turns out
that there are a few of computer manufacturers that map files into the address
space (why? because it's a good idea! check out mach from cmu), and it turns out 
that they have the same NFS worries.

...uw-beaver                                    david m. chinn
      !apcisea                                  apollo computer inc
           !chinn                               bellevue sales office
   (206) 453-5544                               bellevue, washington

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Opinions? Me, have opinions?!?  The preceding was a figment of a very active
imagination, and I can't imagine my company sharing any of my figs
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