NFS Data Definition with the External Data Representation (XDR) Standard
The overall idea behind NFS is to allow you to read from or write to a file on another computer as readily as you do on your local machine. Of course, the files on your local machine are all stored in the same file system, using the same file structure and the same means of representing different types of data. You can't be sure that this will be the case when accessing a remote device, and this creates a bit of a Tower of Babel problem.
One approach would be to simply restrict access only to remote files on machines that use the same operating system. However, this would remove much of the effectiveness of NFS. It would also be highly impractical to require every computer ...
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