> 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.
> 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.