HP-UX Reference (11i v2 03/08) - 4 File Formats (vol 8)

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pfs(4) pfs(4)

NAME

pfs, PFS - portable ﬁle system

DESCRIPTION

The Portable File System, or PFS, allows access to a variety of CD-ROM ﬁle systems. Currently supported

ﬁle systems include:

iso9660, high sierra

, RockRidge Interchange.

The PFS package consists of 7 programs:

pfs_mountd is responsible for maintaining local and remote mounts. It must be running

on both PFS clients and PFS servers. The

pfs_mountd program validates

arguments, and spawns

pfs_mountd.rpc

is the RPC server code associated with pfs_mountd. It should not be exe-

cuted directly.

pfsd responds to all client requests for a given mounted CD-ROM ﬁle system.

pfsd needs to be running on all systems designated as PFS servers.

pfsd

validates arguments, and spawns pfsd.rpc.

pfsd.rpc is the RPC server code associated with

pfsd. It should not be executed

directly.

pfs_exportfs makes local directories available for mounting by PFS clients.

pfs_mount mounts CD-ROM ﬁle system locally or from server.

pfs_umount unmounts CD-ROM ﬁle system locally or from server.

Client ﬁle access calls are converted to PFS protocol requests, and are sent to the server system over the

network. The server receives the request, performs the actual ﬁle system operation, and sends a response

back to the client.

The Portable File System operates in a stateful fashion using remote procedure (

RPC - rfc1057) calls built

on top of external data representation (

XDR - rfc1014) protocol. The RPC protocol provides for version

and authentication parameters to be exchanged for security over the network.

A server can grant access to a speciﬁc ﬁlesystem to certain clients by adding an entry for that ﬁlesystem

to the server’s

/etc/pfs_exports

ﬁle and running pfs_exportfs (1M).

A client gains access to that ﬁlesystem with the

pfs_mount command. Once the ﬁlesystem is mounted

by the client, the server issues a ﬁle handle to the client for each ﬁle (or directory) the client accesses or

creates. If the disc is unmounted at the server, the ﬁle handles becomes stale, and remote requests will

return stale ﬁle handle messages.

A server may also be a client with respect to ﬁlesystems it has mounted over the network, but its clients

cannot gain access to those ﬁlesystems. Instead, the client must mount a ﬁlesystem directly from the

server on which it resides.

ERRORS

Generally physical disk I/O errors detected at the server are returned to the client for action. If the

server is down or inaccessible, the client will see the message:

PFS

server host not responding, retrying...

It will retry 4 times, and then ﬁnally return failure.

AUTHOR

pfs was developed by Young Minds, Inc.

FILES

/etc/pfs_exports