NFS File Servers

NFS is Sun's distributed file system. The files associated with an object will generally reside on one or more remote NFS file servers. In the simplest case, the namespace identifier fs corresponds to the root of an exported NFS file system, as shown in Figure 22-4.

Figure 22-4 NFS File System--Simple Case

In contrast, an object's file system may be composed of multiple--and possibly overlapping--remote mounts, woven together into a "virtual" directory structure managed by FNS.

Figure 22-5 illustrates how this capability might be used to piece together an organization's file system from three separate file servers. The project directory, along with its lib subdirectory, resides on one file server, while the src subdirectory resides on another. Users and applications need not be aware of the use of multiple servers; they see a single, seamless namespace.

Figure 22-5 NFS File System--Multiple Servers