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Date:      Tue, 05 Oct 1999 15:34:19 +0200
From:      Martin Blapp <mb@imp.ch>
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Proposal for the kill-list (userland nfs)
Message-ID:  <37F9FE5B.7D27F186@imp.ch>

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Not many people are aware that our userland mount_nfs(8) and umount(8)
support the following NFS-URL-syntax:

mount /some/path/to/directory@nfs-server /mntpoint

This, however, seems to be BSD-specific. Neither Solaris, Linux, Irix
or any other Operating System support this syntax.  RFC 2224 does not
mention anything about this as well.

While this feature does not really add functionality, it does lead to
several problems:

1.      Parsing a NFS-Path with directory-components which include ':'
        or '@' in their path gets difficult.  To support it,
        mount_nfs(8) and umount(8) have to handle several exceptions:

        - nfs-server:/some@stupid/p@th
        - some:stu:pid/@pa:th@nfsserver

        The chars ':' and '@' are allowed in pathnames.

2.      'nfs-server:/some/path' and '/some/path@nfsserver' should be
        equal.  But umount(8) does not recognize them as equal. You are
        obliged to give the exact variant you had choosen before.

3.     Is is really difficult to recognise whether the nfs-path should
        be relative or absolute.  According to RFC 2224 and RFC 2054,
        NFS does allow absolute _AND_ relative NFS paths. The relative
        path depends on where the public filehandle of the nfs-server is

        stored.

        If we allow both variants with ':' and '@' as delimitors,
        there may be a lot of complicated situations as described
        in (1).

I propose to remove the '@' feature because of the above reasons.  It is

much easier to fix our userland mount(8) and umount(8) commands to
handle the different situations properly as described in the RFC.

Martin



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