Chapter 13. Other Distributed Filesystems

It is useful to take a look at some other distributed filesystems that compete with NFS. Each has a design philosophy and a feature set that is interesting to contrast with the NFS design philosophy and features. This chapter is not exhaustive in its overview—it does not mention some purely proprietary file access protocols like Appletalk and Novell’s Netware. Instead, it focuses on protocols that are well documented and easy to describe in some detail.

13.1 Remote File Sharing

In the mid-1980s, the Remote File Sharing (RFS) feature of UNIX System V release 3 was AT&T’s answer to remote file access. A design requirement for RFS was the complete preservation of UNIX filesystem semantics for remote file ...

Get NFS Illustrated now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.