CS427 Project Web Site

Mohit Narain and Kapil Jain

Project Topic: An architectural study of the Network File System (NFS) and a comparison with other file systems such as NTFS

INTRODUCTION

The Network File System (NFS) was developed by Sun Microsystems to provide distributed transparent file access in a heterogeneous network. The NFS protocol is designed to be portable across different machines, operating systems, network architectures, and transport protocols. This portability is achieved through the use of Remote Procedure Call (RPC) primitives built on top of an eXternal Data Representation (XDR). Implementations already exist for a variety of machines, from personal computers to supercomputers.

Our area of study will focus on the architectural patterns, the influence on features on design and other factors (other than the features) that influence its design. We will then compare the architectural/design styles to other file systems such as NTFS (Windows NT File System) and AFS (Andrews File System).

We intend to schedule our project content as follows...

PHASE I (6th July 2001)

• Introduction to NFS

• NFS Client-Server Architecture overview

PHASE II (20th July 2001)

NFS features and their Influence on Design and Architecture

• Main features

• Influence of features on Design and Architecture

               - Layered Architeccture of NFS

               - Client/Serrver Architecture of NFS

               - Transsparent access with Proxy Pattern

PHASE III (29th July 2001)

More NFS Design Issues

• NFS Security Design

• Mounting and Exporting

• Implications of Statelessness

• Usefulness of  RPC and XDR

Comparitive study

• NFS vs. AFS

• NFS vs. NTFS

RESOURCES

Useful Links for our study of NFS...

http://dune.mcs.kent.edu/~farrell/sa96/notes/nfs/sunnfs/nfs.html
http://dune.mcs.kent.edu/~farrell/sa96/notes/nfs/nfs_10.html
http://www.docs.uu.se/~carle/DS2/Notes/02_NetworkFileSystem.html
http://www.eecs.lehigh.edu/~zhz3/CSC350/NFS/nfs.html
http://userpages.umbc.edu/~jack/ifsm498d/nfs.html
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/rfc/rfc1094.html
http://www.netapp.com/tech_library/3014.html
http://www.netapp.com/tech_library/3085.html#2
http://www.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp/edu/lec/jnakamu/lecture/y98/miy98/part2/p871bp4.htm
http://www.bopac2.comp.brad.ac.uk/~aqdavis/NFS/nfs.htm#mount protocol


Useful Links in our comparison to NTFS...

http://www.fortunecity.com/millenium/celesteville/67/paper-winnt-vs-unix.htm
http://www.netapp.com/tech_library/1003.html
http://cs.gmu.edu/~menasce/osbook/distfs/sld088.html
http://www.unix-vs-nt.org/kirch/
http://www.sdnp.undp.org/rc/forums/tech/sdnptech/msg02320.html
http://jaring.nmhu.edu/notes/cs457/chapt7.htm
http://www.dpo.uab.edu/4manager/ntbook.html#NT1

Useful links in our comparison to AFS

http://www.dpo.uab.edu/4manager/ntbook.html#NT1
http://www.transarc.ibm.com/Library/whitepapers/AFS/afs_nfs.html
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~edsall/computing/software/afs.html
http://members.tripod.co.uk/keetdesign/fs_info/afs.htm

Useful documents/papers - Click here to download

Useful Book: Operating System Concepts (Fifth Edition) by Abraham Silberschatz & Peter Baer Galvin