Not a bug
Latest update:
Peter Weinberger (the "w" in awk), while working at Bell Labs,
wrote an experimental
implementation of a network file system. Included with Research Unix
v8 (Feb 1985, licensed strictly for educational use), it allowed to
share / (yes) with other machines running v8 by specifying a mapping
between a local uid/gui and the desired view from the LAN.
Weinberger described peculiarities of his netfs as
"If A mounted B's file system somewhere, and B mounted A's, then the
directory tree was infinite. That's mathematics, not a bug."
His /usr/src/netfs/TODO contained an existential question:
'why does it get out of synch?'
The connection of this netfs and Sun's NFS is murky.
Steve Johnson:
"I remember Bill Joy visiting Bell Labs and getting a very complete
demo of RFS and being very impressed. Within a year, Sun announced
NFS."
Unix System V SVR3, released by AT&T in 1987, included a different
version of netfs, which they officially began calling RFS. Appearing
18 months after Sun announced NFS, it briefly attempted to compete,
but failed on 2 fronts simultaneously: ⓐ big vendors (Dec, IBM, HP)
disliked its licensing terms, and ⓑ the protocol's brittleness
discouraged ports to non-Unix systems. NFS won, becoming widely
used--even by NeXTSTEP.
Lyndon Nerenberg:
'We ran RFS on a "cluster" of four 3B2s [AT&T microcomputers], and
while it worked, to varying degrees, the statefulness of the
protocol inevitably led to the whole thing locking up, requiring a
reboot of all four machines to recover.'
Tags: ойті
Authors: ag