accessing unix files under 8.0 (2e)

[barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)]

    Date: Tue, 9 Apr 1991 13:28:06 +0000
    From: BAECHLER%eldi.epfl.ch@Warbucks.AI.SRI.COM

    I mentionned yesterday my difficulty to read unix files from my symbolics
    running 8.0. Someone wrote me that this happens because I access them through
    symbolic links instead of direct names, which is the case. I verified that
    when I use direct names I can read my files again. Unhappily this is not a
    very conveninient solution because we have no big Sun server and our files
    are spread across several machines. So, does anyone have a solution to access
    files through symbolic links?

If you're encountering the problem I think you are, I've been begging
Symbolics for a fix to this bug for months.  It worked right in Genera
7.2 NFS, but they broke it in 8.0.

The problem is that Symbolics NFS isn't emulating Unix's interpretation
of symbolic links correctly.  Theoretically, when a Lispm user specifies
<hostname>:<pathname> they are supposed to access the same file as a
user logged into <hostname> who specifies just <pathname>.  When Unix
encounters a symbolic link on a remote file system it reinterprets it
*locally*.  Therefore, when a Lispm user accesses <unixhost>:<link>, it
should interpret the link as <unixhost>:<linktarget>.  It doesn't get
this right if the link actually lives on a different host from
<unixhost>.  For instance, if UNIX1 mounts /foo from UNIX2, you try to
access UNIX1:/foo/link, which is a link to /bar/target, it will try to
access UNIX2:/bar/target instead of UNIX1:/bar/target.

                                                barmar