Genera 8.1, NFS & my confusion

[razzell%cs.ubc.ca@Warbucks.AI.SRI.COM (Dan Razzell)]

> With the advent of Genera 8.1, our Symbolic machines can now use NFS to
> access the UNIX machine file systems
> ...
> But using NFS, one gets an exception stating "No NFS mount could be made
> on host H ... Too many levels of remote in path for H:F"

We've been suffering this for years.  It is due to some pervasive dumbness
on the part of Symbolics NFS.  We don't use the automounter, so I can't
comment on whether that would provide an effective workaround.

What I can say is that Symbolics NFS has an unusual model of how to
interact with other NFS hosts:

1) It doesn't broadcast its requests for NIS (Yellow Pages) maps, so the
   ones it gets by copying from a neighboring host are often inappropriate.
   I have a crude workaround for this if you have NFS sources.

2) It will try to mount a filesystem through another host instead of
   making the mount request to the server of that filesystem.  This is
   the problem you describe.  It sounds like the 8.1 ECO #1 NFS patches
   are supposed to address this.

3) Compounding this is the matter of the Symbolics namespace having to be
   maintained separately from the NIS maps and being unable to defer to
   them.  That is not a problem with the NFS implementation per se, just an
   unpleasant fact of life.