Hi,

I was told that CIFS is a more stateful protocol compared with NFS. The
problem I'm trying to resolve is a port over scenario that currently we use
NFS on unix to load some executable from remote NAS filer to run locally. To
port over to windows, the filer will need to speak CIFS. However, what I was
told is that because of the statefulness of CIFS, when a dll needs to reload
(maybe because of paging out), any small error in network will keep the
process from running normally.

Obviously, this is a very rough description. What I want to know is what is
the experience people have with loading binaries to run locally with CIFS?
How bad is any potential issues (like intermittent network disconnectivity)
caused by the statefulness of CIFS?

Thanks,
Guowei

MS-Office run over the network has been a fairly common deployment scenario
for years, so in answer to the question, can it be done: yes.

Generally the network issues that you mention don't really come into play in
the dll load scenario except when the app uses a delayed load strategy.
Meaning that at initialization there may be a minimum number of dll's
actually loaded and then during runtime, a few more are added. If the
network is unavailable at that time (regardless of CIFS vs NFS), then the
call will fail. This would generally be considered a catastrophic failure
(i.e. most apps assume that LoadLibrary() will succeed and therefore could
not recover from it, though they could be designed to).

The 'statefulness' issue generally is a bigger consideration when you have
apps monitoring for change-notifications. NFS2 (which I assume you are
running) expects clients to poll for changes. CIFS handles this on the
server side. NFS4 implements some stateful characteristics like server side
change notifications.

Pat


"William Shieh" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:3fd57390$(E-Mail Removed)...
> Hi,
>
> I was told that CIFS is a more stateful protocol compared with NFS. The
> problem I'm trying to resolve is a port over scenario that currently we
use
> NFS on unix to load some executable from remote NAS filer to run locally.
To
> port over to windows, the filer will n