Fw: [Courses] [FS] a socket + finger question

[Laurel Fan]

On Fri, Jul 25, 2003 at 12:54:38AM -0400, Vatsan Madhavan wrote: 
> Yes, it is on a nfs mounted filesystem. I've tested it otherwise,
> and named pipes work fine.

Besides the security concerns already explained, there are practical
reasons why named pipes on an nfs filesystem do not work between
different hosts (sometimes they will work on a single host).  In
short, implementing named pipes would require a different sort of
communication between the different hosts, and the implementors of the
nfs protocol probably felt that the benefits of having named pipes
would not justify the added complexity and work this would require.

There is an entry in the Unix FAQ about .plan file named pipes that
talks about both the nfs and security issues:

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/faq/part4/section-9.html

-- 
laurel at sdf.lonestar.org
http://dreadnought.gorgorg.org