🚀 go-pugleaf

As someone who has done a lot of work with NFS on a wide variety
of machines I am somewhat confused on Masscomp's statements.

I too heard what Stan indicated from Masscomp when they talked
to JPL about being a beta site for 4.0.  The claim was that
for NFS to work you needed to have the EXOS 301 board, which
just 2 months ago they said they were still evaluating it.

Given the nature of NFS and the fact that almost all of the client
NFS code has tunable parameters I can see no logical reason why
you could not run it with a 201 or with a 68000/10.  My
understanding is that the 301 is identical with the 201 except
faster,  a Masscomp techie even told me when they first got
one for testing the plugged it in and it worked.

This may mean that NFS will be slow on the 201/68010 systems but
that should not make it unusable.  I have ran NFS on systems
that during debugging phases would take *seconds* to respond to
some requests and with a properly configured client it worked
perfectly.  The two major trouble points tend to be a machine
not responding fast enough for a client which usually is
configurable via "timeo" to a higher value, and a server not
accepting 8K of UDP packets back to back which can be tuned
via shrinking the read and write sizes.

My personal theory is that Masscomp thinks people will only
except fast NFS systems or they want to sell a bunch of
301 boards.  If you can live with slower performence then you
might not need to buy a 301.

		-David

P.S.  The 201 boards are horribly slow, a 68010 with in kernel
TCP/IP is considerably faster than a 201 board.


-- 
	David Robinson		elroy!david@csvax.caltech.edu     ARPA
				david@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov
				ames!elroy!david UUCP
Disclaimer: No one listens to me anyway!