Transport issues in the network file system

ABSTRACT

The Sun Network File System (NFS) is a popular protocol to access files across a network [Sandberg 86]. NFS is implemented on machines as different as Personal Computers, and Cray-2 supercomputers. It uses Sun Remote Procedure Call [Sun 88] and External Data Representation [Sun 87] specifications, which can be used on a variety of transport protocols. The original design goal for NFS was to support small clusters of machines on local area networks. Thus a datagram protocol (UDP) was chosen to simplify transport.Using a connection-less transport protocol meant that nothing explicitly needed to be done to handle server or network failures. However, the use of NFS has expanded to cover much larger and more complicated networks than was ever anticipated. This has caused some NFS users to experience the problems of congestion and flow controI that transport protocols have been designed to address. This paper discucsses some alternatives for NFS transport protocols. Other issues such as inter-domain authentication, are not discussed here.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

General Terms:
Design, Performance, Theory