HDS ViewStation System Administrator's Guide

A Hypertext Document


NFS File Transfer Protocol

This page describes operation of the NFS file transfer protocol.

NFS (Network File System)
NFS (Network File System) is a file transfer protocol from Sun Microsystems. NFS allows the HDS ViewStation to access fonts and/or local clients as if they were on a local disk drive. Note that support for NFS is not present in the ViewStation's bootprom, so NFS is not available for first-time booting of the ViewStation.

Setting up NFS on your host system involves decisions about security and file system management. Consult your system administrator.

NFS allows the ViewStation to perform transparent file access over the network. The ViewStation dynamically mounts the filesystem and then transfers the file; it does not use a static mount. The HDSware tape may be loaded on any filesystem on any host available to the ViewStation.

There are two ways to handle NFS processes - one for Sun OS 4.1.x (or BSD types) and one for Solaris 2.x (or Sys V R4.x types). The NFS functions are the same, but the syntax and file names are different.

For Sun OS 4.1.x and BSD-type UNIX
This page describes operation of NFS on BSD-type UNIX systems.

For Solaris 2.x and Sys V UNIX
This page describes operation of NFS on Sys V UNIX systems.

NFS Settings on the ViewStation
1. Check the ViewStation's transfer block size. The ViewStation uses a 8192 byte block size by default. If 8192 is too large for your network environment, you must set the correct value in the ViewStation's configuration file, which is /hds-fx/config/config.fx.

The ViewStation resource is:
HDSsetup.NFS.block.size: 8192 (permitted values are 128 to 8192)

2. On the Remote Hosts menu in Setup Mode, select the NFS file transfer protocol for any hosts you want, and then set the Remote Mount Directory and the Local Mount Directory to the exported file system on the host computer. An example is given on the following page.

Using NFS for ViewStation File Access
This page describes operation of the Remote and Local Mount Directory feature on the ViewStation.

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