Network File System

NFS, like many other protocols, builds on the Open Network Computing Remote Procedure Call (ONC RPC) system.

People involved in the creation of NFS version 2 include Russel Sandberg, Bob Lyon, Bill Joy, Steve Kleiman, and others.

Using TCP as a transport made using NFS over a WAN more feasible, and allowed the use of larger read and write transfer sizes beyond the 8 KB limit imposed by User Datagram Protocol.

YANFS (Yet Another NFS), formerly WebNFS, is an extension to NFSv2 and NFSv3 allowing it to function behind restrictive firewalls without the complexity of Portmap and MOUNT protocols.

NFS version 4.1 (RFC 5661, January 2010; revised in RFC 8881, August 2020) aims to provide protocol support to take advantage of clustered server deployments including the ability to provide scalable parallel access to files distributed among multiple servers (pNFS extension).

NFS version 4.2 (RFC 7862) was published in November 2016 with new features including: server-side clone and copy, application I/O advise, sparse files, space reservation, application data block (ADB), labeled NFS with sec_label that accommodates any MAC security system, and two new operations for pNFS (LAYOUTERROR and LAYOUTSTATS).

Note: NFS is available on: During the development of the ONC protocol (called SunRPC at the time), only Apollo's Network Computing System (NCS) offered comparable functionality.

Arguments focused on the method for data-encoding — ONC's External Data Representation (XDR) always rendered integers in big-endian order, even if both peers of the connection had little-endian machine-architectures, whereas NCS's method attempted to avoid byte-swap whenever two peers shared a common endianness in their machine-architectures.

An industry-group called the Network Computing Forum formed (March 1987) in an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to reconcile the two network-computing environments.

[23] This caused many of AT&T's other licensees of UNIX System to become concerned that this would put Sun in an advantaged position, and ultimately led to Digital Equipment, HP, IBM, and others forming the Open Software Foundation (OSF) in 1988.

OSF attempted to make DCE RPC an IETF standard, but ultimately proved unwilling to give up change control.