Re: nfsd status.

[Bill White <bill.white@griggsinst.com>]

Sorry, this got away from me before.

At 03:03 PM 11/10/99 -0500, you wrote:
>Bill White <bill.white@griggsinst.com> writes:
>
>> Is anybody else looking at the nfsd daemon?  On Marcus' suggestion
>> I tried it.
>
>Heh.  It's really just not done.  I have most of the details in my
>head.  But it's really just not finished; it was never really well
>tested, and probably is generally broken in lots of little details.  

I guessed as much.  For one thing, you chose to implement the portmap
functionality inside the nfs daemon itself.  Isn't this most typically
implemented as a separate daemon?  I suppose the two most common
applications of Sun RPC - perhaps the only ones - are NFS and NIS et. al.
I suppose ugidd uses Sun RPC.  Is there anything else which might
be interesting?

In any case you may not want NIS, so putting portmap into the first is
perhaps not a mistake.  Also, since the Hurd has its own, more elegant
RPC regime, having SunRPC may not be a terribly useful thing.

Might it be interesting to write something which
translates at the Hurd interface between SunRPC and the Hurd's notion
of RPC, so that applications could use SunRPC on a Linux or Solaris
box, and the Hurd's RPC on a Hurd box?

How does CORBA fit in?  I always want to know how CORBA fits in.

My plan for right now is:
1.) Get the existing nfsd working as far as I can, in the interest of
    getting at least something working.  If I see that there is too much
    missing, or if there is something which would be really hard, I
    will abandon it, but my intention is to push it through at least some
    kind of functionality.  It would be very useful to be able to export
    parts of the Hurd file system.
2.) Look into either moving the Linux portmapper daemon to the Hurd,
    along with all of SunRPC.  I don't know of this is sensible or not,
    but I would like to at least cast a baleful eye upon it.
3.) If (2) seems to make sense, then look at porting the Linux rpc.nfsd
    daemon, along with rpc.ugidd perhaps.

----------------------
Bill White <bill.white@griggsinst.com>
"There's no art to find the mind's construction in the ASCII."
Hamlet, Act I scene 1 (first draft).