Rereading the section on NFS again, I suddenly realize that I was foolish to have skipped it as out of date. Since my last read I have encountered some incarnation (heh) of every single one of the problems listed in that chapter. I'm betting v4 isn't much better either. Is there a good network file system solution!?
> There’s only one problem with a connectionless, stateless (file) system: it doesn’t work.
> Example #1: NFS is stateless, but many programs designed for Unix systems require record locking
> Example #3: If you delete a file in Unix that is still open, the file’s name is removed from its directory, but the disk blocks associated with the file are not deleted until the file is closed.
(Example #2 is a non-issue)
The security is still lacking, and the system still can't handle failures.
Yet, yes, it's faster, easier to set-up, and more widely supported than the alternatives.
There has been a lot of literature published on the problems with NFS, and the mismatch with POSIX file semantics, since 1988. Some of it was even in the original paper from Sun, in fact. To this day, Wikipedia has nothing on the subject. The words "stateful" and "stateless" appear once each in the entire article, with no indication of their pivotal importance, made much of in the actual literature on the subject.
Most of what's on the book has been fixed (not NFS, this one is forever), and we have an entirely new set of things to worry about.
The book is funny, but every part of it feels old.