System Administration Guide, Volume 3

WebNFS Support

The Solaris 2.6 release also included the ability to make a file system on the Internet accessible through firewalls, using an extension to the NFS protocol. One of the advantages to using the WebNFSTM protocol for Internet access is its reliability: the service is built as an extension of the NFS version 3 and version 2 protocol. Soon, applications will be written to utilize this new file system access protocol. Also, an NFS server provides greater throughput under a heavy load than HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) access to a Web server. This can decrease the amount of time required to retrieve a file. In addition, the WebNFS implementation provides the ability to share these files without the administrative overhead of an anonymous ftp site.