Subject: RE: [reiserfs-list] Directory cookie issues

From: "dshaffer" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 12:44:23 -0600

Ran,

	I understand your questions and I didn't mean for the Email to
have a negative flavor. In creating a Server for NT we faced many issues
to make it work because V2/3 had a very Unix flavor. Supporting things
such as SetUID and other operations either were very difficult or
sometimes impossible to do. Tasks that are taken for granted in Unix
such as symbollic links had to be emulated since the underlying OS
didn't support them. Some capabilities we concluded just couldn't be
done at a reasonable performance cost. In V4 the changes to make locking
more complete (and complex?) caused some problems in NT. I am sure NT
isn't the only OS that will have problems implementing the full spec. In
defining V4 if the Protocol can be made more OS independent it will help
it be more inter-operable. You are correct in that the complexity has to
be weighed against this and hopefully we'll come out of this with a
Protocol that will define interoperability for the next 10 years.

Dan

-----Original Message-----
From: RJ Atkinson [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Tuesday, February 06, 2001 11:51 AM
To: dshaffer
Cc: RJ Atkinson; [email-masked]
Subject: RE: [reiserfs-list] Directory cookie issues

At 12:52 06/02/01, dshaffer wrote:
>        I would take exception to your assumption 
>about NFS and Microsoft users. 

        Be careful.  I didn't make an assumption.  
I use NFS on Windows daily.

>We sell into this market and contrary to the opinion expressed there 
>is still a significant base of Users in the Microsoft world using NFS. 

        I'm one of them.  The existing products that I use
support only NFSv3 and work JUST FINE on NT 4.0 and Win9x
with several different NFS servers.  No special NFSv4 changes
were needed.  Gosh !

        All this begs the question of why more changes were
needed in NFSv4 to support Windows.  Since there is an existence
proof that this works fine now, why make all the changes that
make NFSv4 even more complex, hard to troubleshoot operationally,
and harder to test ?  (At this point, its mostly a rhetorical
question).

Ran
[email-masked]

---

From: RJ Atkinson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 Feb 2001 13:43:00 -0500

At 13:44 06/02/01, dshaffer wrote:
> Tasks that are taken for granted in Unix
>didn't support them. 

        (Btw, Windows does have an approximation to symbolic links.  
They are called "shortcuts".  I don't doubt there were other
examples of challenges though.  :-)

>You are correct in that the complexity has to
>be weighed against this 

        My concern is/has been that not much "weighing"
of these tradeoffs has been in evidence on this list.

>and hopefully we'll come out of this with a

        I sure hope so, though people will have to forgive
me for being increasingly doubtful as this plays out...

Ran