ILA-NFS

[andrew@LINC.CIS.UPENN.EDU]

> Date: 20 Jan 89 12:04:00 WET
> From: mcvax!control.lth.se!karlerik@uunet.UU.NET (KARL-ERIK ]RZEN)
> Subject: ILA-NFS

> What are the practical experience with this software? What type of
> files can be stored on the Sun.

We store all our local system software as well as all of our Symbolic's
Software ( layered products, documentation, etc...)

> Is it possible to store the entire (or
> a single partition) of the LMFS on the Sun disk?

If you COPY all the files onto the Sun disk, of course the block 
structure is different.

We have had some problems with file-name translations and have
had to make some changes in the way logical and physical
pathnames are parsed.  Specifically, we've had to change
logical names so that all case information is retained (instead
of upcasing by default).  Also, the flavor LOWER-CASE-PREFERRED-MIXIN
which is mixed into unix pathnames is broken.
(try (send #p"<unix-host>:/foo/foo.lisp" :new-name "bar")
     (send #p"<unix-host>:/foo/foo.lisp" :new-name "BAR")
(notice the case inversion)

We've fixed this to work properly along with allowing things
like README to be accessed (names with all caps).

> What is the price in performance?

Once NFS is setup (we use it as our SYS host, so it is set up for
us at world building time), it works quite speedily.  Systems seem
to load as fast as they would off of local disk, although I haven't
bothered timing this.

We are still
encountering bugs every now and then, although ILA is quick to fix
whatever we report. One problem with NFS is that it does tons of
information caching.  This really messes us up when we change
file-name-parsing or logical translations.  Maybe its just some more
bugs in the code.

The biggest problem that we have with NFS is the lack of security.
We've implemented a fairly trivial hack which prompts for
a password and validates it over an ip-tcp connection.  It is
not that difficult to break but will stop a non-hacker
from gaining illegal access.

Finally, if you plan on using the unix-host as your sys host,
you'll have to bootstrap off of your local LMFS inorder
to load tcp and NFS into your world, before you'll
be able to set site to the unix machine.

Your welcome to what code we've written, but I don't
guarantee anything.

Andrew - Andrew@linc.cis.upenn.edu