Re: designing a brand new NFS.

[Arun Sharma <adsharma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Sep 13, 2000 at 12:35:37PM +0530, Arsalan Zaidi wrote:
> I've decided to take up a project implementing a simple version of NFS for
> my course at NCST. Though the requirements are simple and the time limited,
> I want to have a good design. Who knows, I might work on extending and
> impementing it in full later.

The main problem with NFS is the protocol itself. Not the implementation.
You might consider reading about work from CMU - afs, coda etc. IBM,
which owns the code now is releasing it open source.

The primary problems with NFS (in no particular order):

- No client side caching
- Non scalability (due to 30 sec notification rule)
- No disconnected operation
- Lack of server replication 

Some of these are fixed in NFS v3 and v4. You might want to read up more.

See:

http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/
http://www.extremelinux.org/activities/usenix99/docs/braam/braam.html
http://www.netapp.com/tech_library/nfsbook.html

BTW, reimplementing NFS is not that hard. I did a Java implementation
of the protocol for a class project in a matter of weeks. It was
good enough for a demo ;)

	-Arun