Re: [offtopic] Re: udev and devfs - The final word

Trond Myklebust
2004-01-05T12:07:17Z

På må , 05/01/2004 klokka 02:03, skreiv Rob Landley:

> I'm sure it's still useful. I just haven't wanted to even attempt to secure
> it. For home directories, samba is doing a simple tcp/ip connection per
> session, reestablishing it automatically if it breaks (same server reboot
> question).

...and so does NFS.

> Since _both_ protocols seem to suck pretty badly under the hood,
> it's been a question of choosing the lesser of two evils. It seems that more
> people actually USE samba, so...

...and 95% of all desktop machines are Windows based. So what's new?

> > It could be done (and probably entirely in userspace). I assume you are
> > volunteering to do the work?
>
> I don't like nfs, I haven't bothered to actually use it for anything since
> 1999, so no.

Then you're unlikely to get the feature until someone else finds it
worth their while to implement it.

> I can transparently tunnel any tcp/ip session through ssh with some iptables
> rules and a dozen line python script. (Great fun for rolling your own vpn.)
> Mixing UDP and encryption is just plain a bad idea: no level at which it
> makes sense to store persistent connection state in a "fire and forget"
> packet protocol...)

So do the same thing with NFS now that we've finally gotten RPC over TCP
fully supported under Linux too: everybody else has had it for years.

In 2.6.x, we've also added native RPCSEC_GSS support for kerberos-based
authentication. Packet integrity checking and full privacy are in the
pipeline, as are other security mechanisms.

> Can you recommend a good link to the history of NFS? Computer history's a
> hobby of mine. (I've got snippets on this topic, but not any kind of unified
> story of NFS...)

Dunno if anybody has ever written a proper history of NFS, but I can ask
around. Here are a few sources I found on the fly though. They all tend
to relate to the history of the protocol, and not much about
implementation history (shame that).

NFSv2 transition to NFSv3
http://www.netapp.com/tech_library/evolution.html
RFC1813

transition to NFSv4
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/nfsv4-charter.html
(in particular see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2624.txt which
runs through the earlier design considerations)
RFC3530 (the final version of the protocol)

I'd also recommend nosing around the Connectathon site on
http://www.connectathon.org/
That contains a record of talks going back to 95 (not really that long -
I know) and so should help out with the more recent history.

...of course if you google around, you'll also find loads of Powerpoint
presentations etc...

Cheers,
Trond