== 2026-08-30 Sunday ==

Ihad a nice email from Doug (The Wandering Geek phlog) regarding my
trip back to 1993 with my netbook. He reminded my of a network
protocol I'd forgotten

NFS

Without SSH it was obviously a bit more work to share files &
directories between my "1993 netbook" and other machines on my LAN

Using command-line FTP is fine, as far as it goes. Using rsync is
also out, since it wasn't around in 1993 either.

But NFS has been around for ages. I'd used it myself several years
ago, when first exploring the Linux world, but for some reason it'd
slipped my mind.

Doug's suggestion came at a good time, too.

I'm trying to get myself back on track with my plan - from 2025 -
to learn to code in C. I don't expect to be particularly good at
it, or to write particularly complicated projects. But I'd like to
be able to write a few things from scratch for myself, and to be
able to make small tweaks to other people's code.

I'd read Matto's old phlog post promoting RCS for version control,
if you don't necessarily need all the complex features of Git or
Mercurial etc. I'd been exploring RCS for a day or so, when Doug's
NFS suggestion popped up. 

RCS is good, but how do I write and modify my own code on different
laptops/PCs and keep only one master copy, and also keep RCS up to
date?

NFS is the answer!

I have a ReadyNAS NAS box which will do NFS. So I created a new
NAS share "sourcecode" and exported it from the NAS box via NFS.

I then set up NFS client mode on the 3 laptops I switch between:

1) FreeBSD Dell 7390
2) Devuan Linux Dell 7390
3) Devuan Linux Samsung N150 "back to 1993"

I can access the NFS share from any of them and edit, compile, run,
test my code, and check in/out of RCS.

If I want to do some coding while away from home I'll check out a
working copy in the NFS mounted share, on whichever laptop I'm
taking with me. 

Then copy the file(s) to a separate "working" directory, away from
the NFS share. 

Unmount the NFS share, and I'm free to go, free to edit and test my
code, in the "working directory".

When I come home I can mount the NFS share. 

Copy back the edited version of the file(s) I've been working on
into the NFS share and then check them back into RCS.

The RCS locking mechanism isn't perfect for doing all the work
directly in the NFS share, from multiple clents. 

Since I'm the same user on all machines, and the working copies are
effectively in the same directory on all machines, it's possible to
checkout and lock a file ("RW") on one machine an edit it, still in
the NFS shared directory.

But I can also checkout an unlocked "R" copy on another machine,
which will overwrite the currently checked-out "RW" copy, in "R"
mode. The version checked out "R" will be the last committed
version thus losing whatever changes I've made on the first
machine.

The answer is to do the same as I do when leaving home with a
working copy - copy the files from the NFS share to a working
directory, and only copy the edited files back to the NFS share
when ready to check them back in.

Still, it's a good solution for me.