NFS mount of LMFS file systems from Symbolics to Symbolics

[Barry Margolin <barmar@THINK.COM>]

    Date: Mon, 18 Sep 89 08:44:40 PDT
    From: randy@atc.boeing.com (Randy Groves)

    The subject kind of says it all.  Any possibility of this happening in the
    near future??  What I would like to do is to mount a LMFS from one Symbolics
    machine under a mount point on another Symbolics machine's LMFS.  This would
    allow me, hopefully, to mount all the machines at our site, and back up to an
    Exabyte tape drive over the net.  It seems most of the pieces are there, in
    the NFS product.  Maybe it's already possible??

Are you saying that you would like FOO:>bar to automatically be
translated to BAR:>, so that you could run a backup on FOO and have it
dump BAR's LMFS as well?  I don't think this is possible.

Lispm NFS doesn't mount file systems into the hierarchy the way Unix
does.  LMFS doesn't have the concept of remotely mounted pieces of its
file system, so there's nothing for NFS to plug into; Unix already had
the concept of file system subtrees being mounted from particular
devices, so it was a (relatively) simple matter to replace the device
with a network server.  Genera already has a syntax for specifying
network file servers, HOST:pathname, and NFS plugs in at that level.

Even if you could do the mount as you want, you still wouldn't be able
to do the backup.  First, LMFS backup uses direct disk I/O, so it
wouldn't be able to read remote files.  Second, the NFS protocol doesn't
have any way to access some of LMFS's file properties; for instance,
there would be no way to set the backup date.

What you could do is mount the Lispms from a Unix host, and dump them
from there.  You'll have to find Unix backup software that doesn't use
direct disk access (I think the most common ones do) so that you can
dump a remote file system.  Of course, these dumps won't contain
LMFS-specific file information (e.g. Don't Delete flags) either.

                                                barmar