Creeva’s World 2.0

Lately we’ve had a secu­rity prod­uct at work that allows for secure end to end file shar­ing via NFS.  That is about the best thing I can say about NFS at this point.   For those not famil­iar with NFS wikipedia has this descrip­tion:

 Net­work File Sys­tem (NFS) is a net­work file sys­tem pro­to­col orig­i­nally jointly devel­oped by Sun Microsys­tems and IBM in 1984, allow­ing a user on a client com­puter to access files over a net­work as eas­ily as if the net­work devices were attached to its local disks. NFS, like many other pro­to­cols, builds on the Open Net­work Com­put­ing Remote Pro­ce­dure Call (ONC RPC) sys­tem. The Net­work File Sys­tem pro­to­col is spec­i­fied in RFC 1094, RFC 1813, and RFC 3530 (which obso­letes RFC 3010).

Now you may go a net­work­ing file sys­tem how can I guy hate that?  The eas­i­est answer is that the bane part of my exis­tence over this stems from group file shar­ing.   There is a group in the office that needs shared access to the files that are located on the NFS share.   The rea­son this is an issue is that they all access the files at the same time.

The issue where we are hav­ing prob­lems is that the NFS prod­uct does not sup­port file lock­ing.   This means that mul­ti­ple users can all have the same file open at the same time and save the file at the same time.   This causes over­writ­ing of the file and leads to cor­rup­tion of said files.

NFS as a pro­to­col does not include manda­tory file lock­ing.   If file lock­ing would have been included back in 1984 in the RFC spec­i­fi­ca­tion this wouldn’t an issue.  I am assum­ing the orig­i­nal RFC writ­ers didn’t fathom that mul­ti­ple peo­ple would have the file open at the same time over a net­work, when net­work­ing was rare and not ubiquitous.

Now before I hear com­ments or e-mails about the statd and lockd that adds optional file lock­ing, I would like to point out the “optional” part of that line.   While there have been meth­ods to shoe horn file lock­ing abil­i­ties into NFS so it can keep up with pro­to­cols such as CIFS, Web­DAV, and mul­ti­tudes of other “mod­ern” file shar­ing pro­to­cols, it’s like putting sneak­ers on an ele­phant — since it’s not manda­tory no one is going to do it and it never will work right.

I’m just vent­ing my frus­tra­tions on pro­to­cols that would due bet­ter to be obso­leted com­pletely then try­ing to make a patch­work quilt out of them.

I’m really not alone on this line of thought, some­one wrote a paper called “Use of NFS Con­sid­ered Harm­ful”.  I have since used this paper in my case to man­age­ment of why this imple­men­ta­tion is a ter­ri­ble idea.