mounting a lispm file system from a unix m

[barmar@Think.COM]

   Date: Wed, 14 Feb 90 19:51:16 EST
   From: montalvo@crl.dec.com

	   ls -aF

   command, I got the following error:

	   .: Invalid argument

   Does anyone know what's going on?  Thanks.

This problem only exists with Ultrix NFS clients of Lispm servers.  For
some reason, Ultrix isn't able to read Lispm directories.  I've never been
able to figure out what its problem is; when I use NFS:RPC-TRACE the
requests and responses all look the same as when a Sun client does a
directory list.  I'm convinced its an Ultrix bug.  Ultrix 2.x had the bug
in a slightly different form -- it would just act as if the directory were
empty (I suspect the same error was occurring internally, but that the error
code wasn't being propogated to the caller in the older release).

Ultrix has another serious problem when using Lispm servers.  The sequence
of NFS operations that Ultrix uses to open a file for output prevent the
Lispm from incrementing the version number.  The problem is that Ultrix
checks whether the file exists, and truncates the file when it is opened;
SunOS just uses the NFS CREATE operation, which the Lispm server recognizes
as a request to create a new version and return a handle to it.  We
complained to DEC about this problem, but they refused to consider it a
bug, since their current implementation is equivalent on Unix-like servers.

Luckily we don't make too much use of accessing the LMFS from Unix
machines; we have NFS primarily to go the other direction.

						barmar