NFS Question

[John Abreau]

"Kenneth E. Lussier" <ken.lussier at zuken.com> writes:

> 1) If applications are mounted via NFS, and someone runs the
> application, is the processor on the NFS server or the client system
> used? (I'm pretty sure it's the client, but I was told different today,
> so now I'm not sure..)

Under that scenario, the application is being run on the client end, and 
the server is just supplying the bits from its disk. Perhaps the person
who told you differently was confusing NFS with X; you can run an X 
application on a remote machine and have it display on your local machine.
In that case, the application is the X client, and the X server is the 
piece of software that provides pixels, keystrokes, and mouse clicks 
to the client application. If you make the mistake of defining a "server"
as a "remote machine", rather than "something that services requests for 
a particular resource", then the X terminology would seem to be backward.

> 2) What sort of problems are there with NFS on Linux? I have heard that
> there are file locking problems, but nothing really in depth. Anyone
> care to elaborate?

NFS on Linux used to exhibit these problems. Back in 1997, I found it
impossible to get Solaris clients to mount NFS shares from a Linux server. 
But that's no longer the case; I had a Linux NFS server at home that I
ran for over two years, and the only times it's had problems were
immediately following power outages. And a simple (but time-consuming) 
fsck
was all it needed.

I retired it after picking up an old Quantum SnapServer on eBay. I just 
popped in a pair of 100gb IDE drives, clicked through the web admin 
interface to format the drives, and a short time later it was up and 
running.


-- 
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix 
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   Some people say, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
   I often respond, "When elephants fight, it's the grass
   that gets trampled."



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