*BSD News Article 97166


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From: guy@netapp.com (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: 2.2.2 and NFS v3 ?
Date: 5 Jun 1997 13:56:18 -0700
Organization: Network Appliance
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Message-ID: <5n795i$q57@tooting.netapp.com>
References: <01bc6d3d$06b2b920$0a00a8c0@kahuna> <5mu6fc$n4a@ui-gate.utell.co.uk> <5n6hv1$giq$1@sanson.dit.upm.es>
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:42466

Javier Martin Rueda  <jmrueda@diatel.upm.es> wrote:
>NFSv3 specification is publicly available from Sun, as a PostScript
>document (about 50 or 60 pages, I think).

It's also RFC 1813.

>Prior NFS implementations in FreeBSD were NFSv2, and NQNFS.

That's probably better stated as

	The prior NFS implementations in FreeBSD implemented the NFSv2
	and NQNFS protocols.

I.e., NFS V2, NFS V3 and NQNFS are protocols, not implementations; there
can be multiple implementations of them (and *are* multiple
implementations of NFS V2 and NFS V3, at least).

>4. NFS over TCP and UDP is possible,

NFS-over-TCP is *perfectly possible* in NFS V2.  NFS V3 and NFS-over-TCP
are completely orthogonal.  We didn't need NFS V3 for NFS-over-TCP -
heck, I think Rick Macklem had NFS-over-TCP running before he had V3
running, in part because he had NFS-over-TCP running before the NFS V3
spec came out.

>and since TCP has shown to perform generally better,

Well, this is a somewhat controversial statement; in some Solaris
2.5.1-to-Solaris 2.5.1 tests we've run here, NFS-over-UDP did better,
although in tests Sun ran, NFS-over-TCP did better.  More work is needed
to figure out what's going on here.

>that's the default choice in version 3.

It's the default choice in some vendors' NFS client implementations,
including Sun's Solaris 2.5.1 implementation - but it's *still* the
default implementation if you tell it to use NFS V2!  I don't know
whether it's the default choice in *all* vendors' NFS client
implementations.

>5. New authentication methods for improved security: DES, and Kerberos.
>Previous versions just used Unix UID, and GID, which can be faked by
>anyone very easily.

This has nothing to do with NFS V3, either; Solaris 1.x, and Solaris 2.x
prior to 2.5, supported DES authentication even though they had no NFS
V3 implementation, and Solaris 2.x prior to 2.5 supported Kerberos
authentication even though *it* had no NFS V3 implementation.

Perhaps the BSD *implementation* of NFS introduced both V3 and
DES/Kerberos-authenticated RPC at the same time, but that's different
from saying that NFS-over-DES-or-Kerberos-authenticated-RPC is tied to
NFS V3.
-- 
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