NFS at 40 – Remembering the Sun Microsystems Network File System

by signa11 • 10 months ago

178 152 10 months ago

holoduke• 10 months ago

We are still using it for some pretty large apps. Still have not found a good and simple alternative. I like the simplicity and performance. Scaling is a challenge though.

rootnod3• 10 months ago

True. But for example a home server I absolutely love the simplicity. I have 6 Lenovo 720q machines, one of them as a data storage just running simple NFS for quick daily backups before it pushes them to a NAS.

hnlmorg8• 10 months ago

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any decent alternative.

SMB is a nightmare to set up if your host isn’t running Windows.

sshfs is actually pretty good but it’s not exactly ubiquitous. Plus it has its own quirks and performs slower. So it really doesn’t feel like an upgrade.

Everything else I know of is either proprietary, or hard to set up. Or both.

These days everything has gone more cloud-oriented. Eg Dropbox et al. And I don’t want to sync with a cloud server just to sync between two local machines.

jjtheblunt4• 10 months ago

What happened to Transarc's DFS ?

I looked, found the link below, but it seems to just fizzle out without info.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCE_Distributed_File_System

Anyway, we used it extensively in the UIUC engineering workstation labs hundreds of computers, 20+ years ago, and it worked excellently. I set up a server farm 20 years ago of Sun sparcs but used NFS for such.

toast0• 10 months ago

SMB is a nightmare to set up if your host isn’t running Windows.

Samba runs fine on my FreeBSD host? All my clients are Windows though.

If I wanted to have a non-windows desktop client, I'd probably use NFS for the same share.

fodkodrasz2• 10 months ago

SMB is not that terrible to set up (has its quirks definitely), but apple devices don't interoperate well in my experience. SMB from my samba server performs very well from linux and windows clients alike, but the performance from mac is terrible.

NFS support was lacking on windows when I last tried. I used NFS (v3) a lot in the past, but unless in a highly static high trust environment, it was worse to use than SMB (for me). Especially the user-id mapping story is something I'm not sure is solved properly. That was a PITA in the homelab scale, having to set up NIS was really something I didn't like, a road warrior setup didn't work well for me, I quickly abandoned it.

NexRebular• 10 months ago

SMB is a nightmare to set up if your host isn’t running Windows.

It's very easy on illumos based systems due the integrated SMB/CIFS service.

Spivak• 10 months ago

I mean the decent alternative is object storage if you can tolerate not getting a filesystem. You can get an S3 client running anywhere with little trouble. There are lots of really good S3 compatible servers you can self-host. And you don't get the issue of your system locking up because of an unresponsive server.

I've always thought that NFS makes you choose between two bad alternatives with "stop the world and wait" or "fail in a way that apps are not prepared for."

lmm5• 10 months ago

SMB is a nightmare to set up if your host isn’t running Windows.

That's the opposite of my experience. Fire it up and it just works, in less time than it would take you to configure NFS sensibly.

ForHackernews• 10 months ago

Someone else in this thread was suggesting http://www.openafs.org/ but I had never heard of it.

q3k• 10 months ago

9P? Significantly simpler, at the protocol level, than NFS (to the point where you can implement a client/server in your language of choice in one afternoon).

jabl2• 10 months ago

Lustre is big in the HPC/AI training world. Amazing performance and scalability, but not for the faint of heart.

nwellinghoff• 10 months ago

Got any more details about pros and cons based on your experience?

mixmastamyk• 10 months ago

What are most people using today for file serving? For our little lan sftp seems adequate, since ssh is already running.

pkulak• 10 months ago

SMB has always worked great for me.

Arubis• 10 months ago

NFS! At least on my localnet.

nine_k3• 10 months ago

SMB2 for high-performance writable shares, WebDAV for high-performance read-only shares, also firewall-friendly.

Sftp is useful, but is pretty slow, only good for small amounts and small number of files. (Or maybe i don't know how to cook it properly.)

aborsy• 10 months ago

SMB is great for LAN, but its performance over internet is poor. It remains SFTP and WebDAV in that case. SFTP would be my choice, if there is client support.

Narushia4• 10 months ago

NFS v4.2. Easy to set up if you don't need authentication. Very good throughput, at least so long as your network gear isn't the bottleneck. I think it's the best choice if your clients are Linux or similar. The only bummer for me is that mounting NFS shares from Android file managers seems to be difficult or impossible (let alone NFSv4).

the_gipsy• 10 months ago

I think you can serve NFSv4 and also NFSv3 at the same time for those Android apps (e.g. Kodi).

ajross• 10 months ago

What are most people using today for file serving?

Google Drive. Or Dropbox, OneDrive, yada yada. I mean, sure, that's not the question you were asking. But for casual per-user storage and sharing of "file" data in the sense we've understood it since the 1980's, cloud services have killed local storage cold dead. It's been buried for years, except in weird enclaves like HN.

The other sense of "casual filesystem mounting" even within our enclave is covered well already by fuse/sshfs at the top level, or 9P for more deeply integrated things like mounting stuff into a VM.

No one wants to serve files on a network anymore.

SSLy• 10 months ago

Depends on the use-case. Myself I'm using NFS, iCloud, and BitTorrent.

heavyset_go5• 10 months ago

NFSv4 over WireGuard for file systems

WebDAV shares of the NFS shares for things that need that view

sshfs for when I need a quick and dirty solution where performance and reliability don't matter

9p for file system sharing via VMs

arp242• 10 months ago

I just use sshfs for most things today. It's by far the simplest to set up (just run sshd), has good authentication and encryption (works over the internet), and when I measured performance vs. NFS and Samba some years ago it seemed roughly identical (this is mostly for large files; it's probably slower for lots of small files – measure your own use case if performance is important). I don't know about file locking and that type of thing – it perhaps does poorly there(?) It's not something I care about.

jdboyd• 10 months ago

Some NFS, lots of SMB, lots of sftp, some nextcloud, some s3. I wish that TrueNAS made webdav more of a first class service.

whizzter• 10 months ago

As nice as WebDAV would've been it's probably a non-starter in many scenarios due to weird limits, like Windows has a default size-limit of 50mb.

I'm tinkering on a project where I'd like to project a filesystem from code and added web-dav support, the 50mb limit will be fine since it's a corner-case for files to be bigger but it did put a dent into my enthusiasm since I had envisioned using it in more places.

a96• 10 months ago

sshfs for short-lived and single user serving. iscsi for network storage.

Nothing for multi-user or multi-client. Avoid as long as that is possible since there is no good solution in sight.

burnt-resistor4• 10 months ago

200 TiB over Samba across 5 XFS volumes on md raid10 volumes. Time Machine-compatible.

ryandrake• 10 months ago

NFS is the backbone of my home network servers, including file sharing (books, movies, music), local backups, source code and development, and large volumes of data for hobby projects. I don't know what I'd do without it. Haven't found anything more suitable in 15+ years.

INTPenis• 10 months ago

Same. The latest thing I did was put snes state and save files on NFS so I can resume the same game from laptop, to retropi (tv), and even on the road over wireguard.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 10 months ago

I'd seen a proposal to use loopback NFS in place of FUSE:

https://github.com/xetdata/nfsserve

toomim• 10 months ago

See also https://www.legitcontrol.com as presented at https://braid.org/meeting-118 for a beautiful example of "local NFS" as a wonderful replacement for FUSE!

AshamedCaptain• 10 months ago

There is also a site, nfsv4bat.org [...] However, be careful: the site is insecure

I just find this highly ironic considering this is NFS we are talking about. Also, do they fear their ISPs changing the 40 year old NFS specs on the flight or what ? Why even mention this ?

buserror• 10 months ago

I use NFS as a keystone of a pretty large multi-million data center application. I run it on a dedicated 100Gb network with 9k frames and it works fantastic. I'm pretty sure it is still use in many, many places because... it works!

I don't need to "remember NFS", NFS is a big part of my day!

zh34• 10 months ago

On a smaller scale, I run multiple PC's in house diskless with NFS root; so easy to just create copies on the server and boot into them as needed, it's almost one image per bloated app these days (server also boots PC's into Windows using iSCSI/SCST and old DOS boxes from 386 onwards with etherboot/samba). Probably a bit biased due to doing a lot of hardware hacking where virtualisation solutions take so much more effect, but got to agree NFS (from V2 through V4) just works.

semi-extrinsic• 10 months ago

I'm considering NFS with RDMA for a handful of CFD workstations + one file server with 25Gbe network. Anyone know if this will perform well? Will be using XFS with some NVME disks as the base FS on the file server.

fock• 10 months ago

Quite some time ago I implemented NFS for a small HPC-cluster on a 40GBe network. A colleague set up RDMA later, since at start it didn't work with the Ubuntu kernel available. Full nVME on the file server too. While the raw performance using ZFS was kind of underwhelming (mdadm+XFS about 2x faster), network performance was fine I'd argue: serial transfers easily hit ~4GB/s on a single node and 4K-benchmarking with fio was comparable to a good SATA-SSD (IOPS + throughput) on multiple clients in parallel!

heavyset_go5• 10 months ago

Yes, you might want to tune your NFS parameters, stick to NFSv4.2, consider if caching is appropriate for your workloads and at what level, and how much of your NFS + networking you can keep in kernel space if you decide to further upgrade your network's throughput or really expand it.

Also consider what your server and client machines will be running, some NFS clients suck. Linux on both ends works really well.

chasil2• 10 months ago

The last time that I looked, OpenBSD does not support NFSv4 at all.

SoftTalker• 10 months ago

Consider BeeGFS. Had good results with it using infiniband.

jedberg2• 10 months ago

My NFS story: In my first job, we used NFS to maintain the developer desktops. They were all FreeBSD and remote mounted /usr/local. This worked great! Everyone worked in the office with fast local internet, and it made it easy for us to add or update apps and have everyone magically get it. And when the NFS server had a glitch, our devs could usually just reboot and fix it, or wait a bit. Since they were all systems developers they all understood the problems with NFS and the workarounds.

What I learned though was that NFS was great until it wasn't. If the server hung, all work stopped.

When I got to reddit, solving code distribution was one of the first tasks I had to take care of. Steve wanted to use NFS to distribute the app code. He wanted to have all the app servers mount an NFS mount, and then just update the code there and have them all automatically pick up the changes.

This sounded great in theory, but I told him about all the gotchas. He didn't believe me, so I pulled up a bunch of papers and blog posts, and actually set up a small cluster to show him what happens when the server goes offline, and how none of the app servers could keep running as soon as they had to get anything off disk.

To his great credit, he trusted me after that when I said something was a bad idea based on my experience. It was an important lesson for me that even with experience, trust must be earned when you work with a new team.

I set up a system where app servers would pull fresh code on boot and we could also remotely trigger a pull or just push to them, and that system was reddit's deployment tool for about a decade (and it was written in Perl!)

zh34• 10 months ago

Don't know about FreeBSD but hard hanging on a mounted filesystem is configurable (if it's essential configure it that way, otherwise don't). To this day I see plenty of code written that hangs forever if a remote resource is unavailable.

muxator• 10 months ago

Hi, could you give some pointers about this? Thanks!

lmm5• 10 months ago

Don't know about FreeBSD but hard hanging on a mounted filesystem is configurable (if it's essential configure it that way, otherwise don't).

In theory that should work, but I find that kind of non-default config option tends to be undertested and unreliable. Easier to just switch to Samba where not hanging is default/expected.

bitwize2• 10 months ago

I find it fascinating that the fact that NFS mounts hang the process when they don't work is due to the broken I/O model Unix historically employed.

See, unlike some other more advanced, contemporary operating systems like VMS, Unix (and early versions of POSIX) did not support async I/O; only nonblocking I/O. Furthermore, it assumed that disk-based I/O was "fast" (I/O operations could always be completed, or fail, in a reasonably brief period of time, because if the disks weren't connected and working you had much bigger problems than the failure of one process) and network-based or piped I/O was "slow" (operations could take arbitrarily long or even fail completely altogether after a long wait); so nonblocking I/O was not supported for file system access in the general case. Well, when you mount your file system over a network, you get the characteristics of "slow" I/O with the lack of nonblocking support of "fast" I/O.

A sibling comment mentions that FreeBSD has some clever workarounds for this. And of course it's largely not a concern for modern software because Linux has io_uring and even the POSIX standard library has async I/O primitives (which few seem to use) these days.

And this is one of those things that VMS (and Windows NT) got right, right from the jump, with I/O completion ports,

But issues like this, and the unfortunate proliferation of the C programming language, underscore the price we've paid as a result of the Unix developers' decision to build an OS that was easy and fun to hack, rather than one that encouraged correctness of the solutions built on top of it.

ec109685• 10 months ago

It wasn’t until relatively recently approaches like await because commonplace. Imagine all the software that wouldn’t have been written if they were forced to use async primitives before languages were ready for them.

Synchronous IO is nice and simple.

bsder2• 10 months ago

What I learned though was that NFS was great until it wasn't. If the server hung, all work stopped.

Sheds a tear for AFS (Andrew File System).

We had a nice, distributed file system that even had solid security and didn't fail in these silly ways--everybody ignored it.

slater• 10 months ago

Looks like these guys are still truckin' along?

https://www.openafs.org/

nine_k3• 10 months ago

AFS implements weak consistency, which may be a bit surprising. It also seems to share objects, not block devices. Judging by its features, it seems to make most sense when there is a cluster of servers. It looks cool though, a bit more like S3 than like NFS.

cherrycherry98• 10 months ago

Morgan Stanley was a heavy user of AFS for deploying software and might still be for all I know.

"Most Production Applications run from AFS"

"Most UNIX hosts are dataless AFS clients"

https://web.archive.org/web/20170709042700/http://www-conf.s...

tempay• 10 months ago

I'm still in a place where AFS is chugging along for many years after it's much exaggarated demise.

It never ceases to amaze me how well it does what it does and how well it handles being misused.

fuzztester• 10 months ago

Interesting. I think I had casually come across the term AFS (and its full form) back in the day, but never look into it deeply.

Why did everybody ignore it, do you know?

burnt-resistor4• 10 months ago

And heavily used by top universities for the past ~35 years.

neilv3• 10 months ago

I remember that era of NFS.

NFS volumes (for home dirs, SCM repos, tools, and data) were a godsend for workstations with not enough disk, and when not everyone had a dedicated workstation (e.g., university), and for diskless workstations (which we used to call something rude, and now call "thin clients"), and for (an ISV) facilitating work on porting systems.

But even when when you needed a volume only very infrequently, if there was a server or network problem, then even doing an `ls -l` in the directory where the volume's mount point was would hang the kernel.

Now that we often have 1TB+ of storage locally on a laptop workstation (compare to the 100MB default of an early SPARCstation), I don't currently need NFS for anything. But NFS is still a nice tool to have in your toolbox, for some surprise use case.

To his great credit, he trusted me after that when I said something was a bad idea based on my experience. It was an important lesson for me that even with experience, trust must be earned when you work with a new team.

True, though, on a risky moving-fast architectural decision, even with two very experienced people, it might be reasonable to get a bit more evidence.

And in that particular case, it might be that one or both of you were fairly early in your career, and couldn't just tell that they could bet on the other person's assessment.

Though there are limits to needing to re-earn trust from scratch with a new team. For example, the standard FAANG-bro interview of everyone having to start from scratch for credibility, like they are fresh out of school with zero track record, and zero better ways to assess, is ridiculous. The only thing more ridiculous is when companies that pay vastly less try to mimic that interview style. Every time I see that, I think that this company apparently doesn't have experienced engineers on staff who can get a better idea just by talking with someone, rather than fratbro hazing ritual.

jjav3• 10 months ago

Now that we often have 1TB+ of storage locally on a laptop workstation (compare to the 100MB default of an early SPARCstation), I don't currently need NFS for anything.

While diskless (or very limited disk) workstations were one use case for NFS, that was far from the primary one.

The main use case was to have a massive shared filesystem across the team, or division, or even whole company (as we did at Sun). You wouldn't want to be duplicating these files locally no matter how much local disk, the point was to have the files be shared amongst everyone for collaboration.

NFS was truly awesome, it is sad that everything these days is subpar. We use weak substitutes like having files on shared google drives, but that is so much inferior to having the files of the entire company mounted on the local filesystem through NFS.

(Using the past tense, since it's not used so much anymore, but my home fileserver exports directories over NFS which I mount on all other machines and laptops at home, so very much using it today, personally.)

ninkendo• 10 months ago

I was at Apple around 15 years ago working as a sysadmin in their hardware engineering org, and everything - and I mean everything - was stored on NFS. We ran a ton of hardware simulation, all the tools and code were on NFS as well as the actual designs and results.

At some point a new system came around that was able to make really good use of the hardware we had, and it didn’t use NFS at all. It was more “docker” like, where jobs ran in containers and had to pre-download all the tools they needed before running. It was surprisingly robust, and worked really well.

The designers wanted to support all of our use cases in the new system, and came to us about how to mount our NFS clusters within their containers. My answer was basically: let’s not. Our way was the old way, and their way was the new way, and we shouldn’t “infect” their system with our legacy NFS baggage. If engineers wanted to use their system they should reformulate their jobs to declare their dependencies up front and use a local cache, and all the other reasonable constraints their system had. They were surprised by my answer but I think it worked out in the end: it was the impetus for things to finally move off the legacy infrastructure, and it worked out well in the end.

hinkley4• 10 months ago

I heard rumors at first and later saw it once that the sparc lab at my university occasionally had to be shut down and turned on in a particular order to get the whole thing to spool back up after a server glitch. I think the problem got really nasty once you had NFS mounts from multiple places.

burnt-resistor4• 10 months ago

sync with tcp on NFS 2 had the hang problem. async on NFS 3+ was better but could still hang if configured using sync.

NFS 4.1 introduced pNFS scalability and 4.2 has even more optimizations.

hedora2• 10 months ago

You probably gave bad advice. By the time Reddit existed, you could have just gotten an netapp filer. They had higher availability than most data centers back then, so “the NFS server hung” wouldn’t be anywhere near the top of your “things that cause outages or interfere with engineering” list.

These days, there are plenty of NFS vendors with similar reliability. (Even as far back as NFSv3, the protocol makes it possible for the server to scale out).

jedberg2• 10 months ago

I guess I have to earn your trust too. I was actually intimately familiar with Netapp filers at the time, since that is what we used to drive the NFS mounts for the desktops at the first place I mentioned. They were not as immune as you think and were not suitable.

Also, we were a startup, and a Netapp filer was way outside the realm of possibility.

Also, that would be a great solution if you have one datacenter, but as soon as you have more than one, you still have to solve the problem of syncing between the filers.

Also, you generally don't want all of your app servers to update to new code instantly all the same time, in case there is a bug. You want to slow roll the deploy.

Also, you couldn't get a filer in AWS, once we moved there.

And before we moved to AWS the rack was too full for a filer, I would have had to get a whole extra rack.

burnt-resistor4• 10 months ago

NetApps were a game changer. Large Windows Server 2003 file servers that ran CIFS, NFS, and AFP simultaneously could take 60-90 minutes to come back online because of the resource fork enumeration scan required by AFP sharing.

throw0101d2• 10 months ago

You probably gave bad advice. By the time Reddit existed, you could have just gotten an netapp filer. They had higher availability than most data centers back then, so “the NFS server hung” wouldn’t be anywhere near the top of your “things that cause outages or interfere with engineering” list.

Or distributed NFS filers like Isilon or Panasas: any particular node can be rebooted and its IPs are re-distributed between still-live node. At my last job we used one for HPC and it stored >11PB with minimal hassle. OS upgrades can be done in a rolling fashion so client service is not interrupted.

Newer NFS vendors like Vast Data have all-NVME backends (Isilon can have a mix if you need both fast and archival storage: tiering can happen on (e.g.) file age).

cramcgrab2• 10 months ago

Auto home! And jumpstart! Aah, the network is the computer!

cramcgrab2• 10 months ago

Zfs includes nfs, its built in and very handy still!

E39M5S622• 10 months ago

If you're talking about OpenZFS, that is a thin wrapper over knfsd/exports file. They don't actually ship an NFS daemon in the OpenZFS code.

krunger• 10 months ago

ZFS is amazing, used it since around Solaris 10, and yes, loved it for it's NFS capability, had many terabytes at the time on it, back when a terabyte meant a rack of drives! Now those same systems host petabytes, all upgraded in place. Solaris was pretty amazing too.

sunshine-o3• 10 months ago

If only I could mount a NFS share Android ...

Narushia4• 10 months ago

I looked into this a while ago and was surprised to find that no file explorer on Android seems to support it[1]. However, I did notice that VLC for Android does support it, though unfortunately only NFSv3. I was at least able to watch some videos from the share with it, but it would be nice to have general access to the share on Android.

[1] Of course, I didn’t test every single app — there’s a bucketload of them on Google Play and elsewhere…

sunshine-o3• 10 months ago

Yes ! they are using a a client library for that https://github.com/sahlberg/libnfs

heavyset_go5• 10 months ago

Been a while, but if you root your phone and have access to the kernel source in order to build the NFS modules, would you be able to mount NFS shares then?

sunshine-o3• 10 months ago

Yes, you need a rooted phone since usually support is at the kernel level

Eikon• 10 months ago

ZeroFS uses NFS/9P instead of fuse!

https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS

nasretdinov• 10 months ago

I have really mixed feelings about things like NFS, remote desktop, etc. The idea of having everything remote to save resources (or for other reasons) does sound really appealing in theory, and, when it works, is truly great. However in practice it's really hard to make these things be worth it, because of latency. E.g. for network block storage and for NFS the performance is usually abysmal compared to even a relatively cheap modern SSD in terms of latency, and many applications now expect a low latency file system, and perform really poorly otherwise.

zh34• 10 months ago

Fairly obviously a 1Gbps network is not going to compete with 5Gbps SATA or 20Gbps NVME. Having said that, for real performance we load stuff over the network into local RAM and then generally run from that (faster than all other options). On the internal network the server also has a large RAM disk shared over NFS/SMB, and the performance PC's have plenty of RAM - so really it's a tradeoff, and the optimum is going to depend on how the system is used.

Palomides2• 10 months ago

want to emphasize, for those who haven't been following, a nice used 25Gb ethernet card is like $25 now

heavyset_go5• 10 months ago

I can saturate both a 1 and 2.5 Gbps links with WireGuard encrypted NFSv4 on thin clients that are relatively old.

I also use it for shared storage for my cluster and NAS, and I don't think NFS itself has ever been the bottleneck.

Latency-wise, the overhead is negligible on via LAN, though can be noticeable when doing big builds or running VMs.

E39M5S622• 10 months ago

PornHub's origin clusters serve petabytes of files off of NFS mounts - it's still alive and well in lots of places.

commandersaki• 10 months ago

Ah Network Failure System, good memories.

amacbride• 10 months ago

My introduction to NFS was first at Berkeley, and then at Sun. It more or less just worked. (Some of the early file servers at Berkeley were drastically overcapacity with all the diskless Sun-3/50s connected, but still.)

And of course I still use it every day with Amazon EFS; Happy Birthday, indeed!

cyberax• 10 months ago

A good time to plug my NFSv4 client in Go: https://github.com/Cyberax/go-nfs-client :) It's made for EFS, but works well enough with other servers.

alexpotato• 10 months ago

CTO at a hedge fund I worked at had a great quote:

"NFS is like heroin: it seems like a great idea at first and then it ruins your life" (as many commenters are pointing out)

Still an amazing technology for it's time though.

brcmthrowaway• 10 months ago

How does Isilon compare to nfs?

green-salt• 10 months ago

Isilon has their own filesystem that stores the data across multi-node clusters, you then export that out over NFS/SMB/S3, and the nodes load balance the I/O across the cluster.

technofiend• 10 months ago

As a unix sysadmin in the early 90s, I liked to understand as much as I could about the tech that supported the systems I supported. All my clients used NFS so I dug into the guts of RPC until I could write my own services and publish them via portmap.

Weirdly that nerd snipe landed me two different jobs! People wanted to build network-based services and that was one of the quickest ways to do it.

la64710• 10 months ago

Autofs Still magic …

pjmlp• 10 months ago

The wonders of not being able to login on university servers due to NFS communication problems preventing to mount the directory.

Usually caused by a coaxial cable not being properly terminated.

Naturally it meant nothing on the network was working, however NFS was kind of the canary in the mine for it.

axpvms• 10 months ago

I liked this post about No File Security from a previous thread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31820504

cik• 10 months ago

I still love NFS. It's a cornerstone to how I end up thinking about many problems. In my house it provides a simple NAS mount. In certain development environments, I use sshmount because of it.

But I really loved the lesser known RFS. Yes it wasn't as robust, or as elegent.. but there's nothing quite like mounting someone else's sound card and blaring music out of it, in order to drive a prank. Sigh...

ozozozd• 10 months ago

Like someone’s _Sound Blaster_?

lukeh• 10 months ago

It was amusing to read the comment about the flat UID/GID namespace being a problem, identified as far back as 1984. This is something that DCE addressed by using a larger namespace (UUIDs), and Windows finally got right using a hierarchical one (SIDs).

jamespo• 10 months ago

Anyone remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebNFS ?

irusensei• 10 months ago

I think NFS is the most sane storage provider for self hosted Kubernetes. Anything else seems over engineered for a home lab and is normally not a very good experience.

What I don't like is the security model. It's either deploying kerberos infrastructure or "trust me bro I'm UID 1000" so I default to SMB on the file server.

drewg123• 10 months ago

NFS was a huge part of my life in the 90s..

- It caused me to switch from Linux to FreeBSD in 1994 when Linux didn't have NFS caching but FreeBSD did & Linus told me "nobody cares about NFS" at the Boston USENIX. I was a sysadmin for a small stats department, and they made heavy use of NFS mounted latex fonts. Xdvi would render a page in 1s on FreeBSD and over a minute on Linux due to the difference in caching. Xdvi would seek byte-by-byte in the file.. You could see each character as it rendered on Linux, and the page would just open instantly on FreeBSD.

- When working as research staff for the OS research group in the CS dept, I worked on a modern cluster filesystem ("slice") which pretended to be NFS for client compat. (https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/osdi00/full_papers/ander...)

Publius_Enigma2• 10 months ago

Still performs better than SMB on macOS for many workloads!

p_ing2• 10 months ago

Apple just doesn't seem to care about SMB on macOS even though it is now the primary file sharing protocol.

msravi• 10 months ago

Wait. I still export NFS mounts from my TrueNAS server and make them available to all other machines on my LAN (music, books, documents, photos, etc). The article and comments here give me the feeling that NFS is outadated and shouldn't be used anymore. Am I doing things wrong?

SamPatt• 10 months ago

I do exactly the same thing, and it works beautifully. We can't really be doing it wrong if it's working!

Publius_Enigma2• 10 months ago

I’ve been using NFS in various environments since my first introduction to it in my university’s Solaris and Linux labs. I’ve run it at home, on and off, since 2005.

I’ve recently started using it again after consistent issues with SMB on Apple devices, and the deprecation of AFP. My FreeBSD server, running on a Raspberry Pi, makes terabytes of content available to the web via an NFS connection to a Synology NAS.

For my use case, with a small number of users, the fact that NFS is host based rather than user based, means I can set it up one on each device, and all users of that host can access the shares. And I’ve generally found it to be more consistently performant on Apple hardware than their in-house SMB implementation.

mannyv• 10 months ago

NFS, hard mounts, hang. I remember them well.

NFS at 40 – Remembering the Sun Microsystems Network File System

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