[nflug] NFS isn't (all) bad.

[Ken Smith]

On Thu, 2006-04-27 at 21:31 -0400, Justin Bennett wrote:

> In practice NFS over a LAN works well, I understand the UDP could be a 
> concern on paper, but if your loosing UDP packets then you have more 
> important problems with your LAN. I haven't experienced any locking 
> issues and/or corruption  in the 4-5 years we've been running NFS in a 
> production environment on a daily basis.

FWIW...

NFS was from the ground up designed to be a stateless protocol that can
"survive" the server rebooting with no issues for the clients.  For
local networks UDP doesn't cause any problems for NFS because NFS was
designed to have clients re-send any requests the server doesn't answer
after a suitable timeout period.  The only time I've ever had data
corruption issues was way back when systems shipped with UDP
checksumming turned off by default so there was the possibility of data
corruption inside packets that arrived - with UDP checksumming turned on
(and therefore any corrupted packets that arrived were simply thrown
away) that problem went away.

UDP over anything other than a LAN does wind up being too lossy to be
usable for the packet sizes NFS tries to use.  You can use NFS over TCP
on virtually any modern *nix but as someone else suggested fileserving
over public networks is in general a Bad Idea(TM) for a wide variety of
reasons, no matter what fileservice protocol you use.

Because it was originally designed to be as stateless as possible things
that require state (e.g. file locking) were hacks that came along later
in NFS's life cycle and are at best exactly that - hacks.

For some things it's the wrong tool.  For some things it's the right
tool.  Just $0.02 from someone who's been using it heavily for something
closer to 15 years... :-)

-- 
                                                Ken Smith
- From there to here, from here to      |       kensmith at cse.buffalo.edu
  there, funny things are everywhere.   |
                      - Theodore Geisel |


_______________________________________________
nflug mailing list
nflug at nflug.org
http://www.nflug.org/mailman/listinfo/nflug