[HN Gopher] NFS at 40 - Remembering the Sun Microsystems Network...
___________________________________________________________________
NFS at 40 - Remembering the Sun Microsystems Network File System
Author : signa11
Score : 52 points
Date : 2025-10-05 15:49 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nfs40.online)
(TXT) w3m dump (nfs40.online)
| holoduke wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 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.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| 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.
| convolvatron wrote:
| I used to administer AFS/DFS and braved the forest of
| platform ifdefs to port it to different unix flavors.
|
| plusses were security (kerberos), better administrative
| controls and global file space.
|
| minuses were generally poor performance, middling small
| file support and awful large file support. substantial
| administrative overhead. the wide-area performance was so
| bad the global namespace thing wasn't really useful.
|
| I guess it didn't cause as many actual multi-hour outages
| NFS, but we used it primarily for home/working directories
| and left the servers alone, whereas the accepted practice
| at the time was to use NFS for roots and to cross mount
| everything so that it easily got into a 'help I've fallen
| and can't get up' situation.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| that's very similar to what we were doing for the
| engineering workstations (hundreds of hosts across a very
| fast campus network)
|
| (off topic, but great username)
| nbernard wrote:
| AFS (on which DFS was based) lives on as OpenAFS [0]. And
| there is a commercial evolution/solution from AuriStor [1].
|
| [0]: https://openafs.org/
|
| [1]: https://www.auristor.com/filesystem/
| toast0 wrote:
| > 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.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| It runs fine but it's _a nightmare to set up_.
|
| It's one of those tools that, unless you already know what
| you're doing, you can expect to sink several hours into
| trying to get the damn thing working correctly.
|
| It's not the kind of thing you can throw at a junior and
| expect them to get working in an afternoon.
|
| Whereas NFS and sshfs "just work". Albeit I will concede
| that NFSv4 was annoying to get working back when that was
| new too. But that's, thankfully, a distant memory.
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| 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.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| > SMB is not that terrible to set up
|
| Samba can be. Especially when compared with NFS
|
| > NFS support was lacking on windows when I last tried.
|
| If you need to connect from Windows then your options are
| very limited, unfortunately.
| NexRebular wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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."
| hnlmorg wrote:
| If you don't need a filesystem, then your options are
| numerous. The problem is sometimes you do need exactly
| that.
|
| I do agree that object storage is a nice option. I wonder
| if a FUSE-like object storage wrapper would work well here.
| I've seen mixed results for S3 but for local instances, it
| might be a different story.
| zokier wrote:
| AWS has this "mountpoint for s3" thingy
| https://github.com/awslabs/mountpoint-s3
| q3k wrote:
| 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).
| jabl wrote:
| Lustre is big in the HPC/AI training world. Amazing performance
| and scalability, but not for the faint of heart.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| What are most people using today for file serving? For our little
| lan sftp seems adequate, since ssh is already running.
| pkulak wrote:
| SMB has always worked great for me.
| Arubis wrote:
| NFS! At least on my localnet.
| nine_k wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Narushia wrote:
| 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).
| ajross wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Depends on the use-case. Myself I'm using NFS, iCloud, and
| BitTorrent.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'd seen a proposal to use loopback NFS in place of FUSE:
|
| https://github.com/xetdata/nfsserve
| toomim wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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!
| zh3 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| jedberg wrote:
| 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!)
| zh3 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Hi, could you give some pointers about this? Thanks!
| zh3 wrote:
| It's down to the mount options, use 'soft' and the program
| trying to access the (inaccessible) server gets an error
| return after a while, or 'intr' if you want to be able to
| kill the hung process.
|
| The caveat is a lot of software is written to assume things
| like fread(), fopen() etc will either quickly fail or work.
| However, if the file is over a network obviously things can
| go wrong so the common default behaviour is to wait for the
| server to come back online. Same issue applies to any other
| network filesystem, different OS's (and even the same OS
| with different configs) handle the situation differently.
| cramcgrab wrote:
| Auto home! And jumpstart! Aah, the network is the computer!
| cramcgrab wrote:
| Zfs includes nfs, its built in and very handy still!
| E39M5S62 wrote:
| 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.
| sunshine-o wrote:
| If only I could mount a NFS share Android ...
| Narushia wrote:
| 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...
| Eikon wrote:
| ZeroFS uses NFS/9P instead of fuse!
|
| https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS
| nasretdinov wrote:
| 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.
| zh3 wrote:
| 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.
| Palomides wrote:
| want to emphasize, for those who haven't been following, a
| nice used 25Gb ethernet card is like $25 now
| zokier wrote:
| But how much is a 25GbE (or 40GbE) switch?
| E39M5S62 wrote:
| PornHub's origin clusters serve petabytes of files off of NFS
| mounts - it's still alive and well in lots of places.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-10-05 23:00 UTC)