Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Alan K Biocca <[email protected]> · Fri, 30 Apr 1999 16:53:14 -0700

As I recall, VxWorks boots via rsh or ftp protocols. If there is no
password it uses rsh. If there is a password in the boot params it uses
ftp. NFS activity only occurs if several things are done:

1) NFS is compiled into the BSP.
2) NFS Mount commands are successfully executed.
3) the precise pathname used in the mount is used to access the file.

and of course, the nfs mount will not succeed unless NFS exports are setup
properly on the host.

I haven't used AFS but I believe it requires special vendor software
(expen$ive, probably not available for vxworks) to operate.

you can continue to use rsh or ftp type access to your AFS host. some
behavior changes slightly however. for example opening a file may result in
the whole file being read into temporary allocated ram, so opening a file
larger than available memory fails. doing random i/o on a moderate sized
file is very slow.

ftp access puts the password in the clear on the wire frequently, plus it
is available to anyone who accesses the boot params. security wise rsh is
better with .rhosts.

Good Luck,

-- Alan K Biocca
ALS Controls

At 11:37 AM 4/30/99 , [email protected] wrote:
>Hi,
>
> The computer center (SCS) here at SLAC planning
>to move our vxworks account from NFS to AFS
>and completely get rid of all of our NFS 
>directories where we log files. It was my
>understanding that you could not boot 
>an ioc from an AFS account or write files
>to AFS space. 
>
>I've changed the boot parameter "user"
>in an ioc from "vxworks", which is an NFS
>account, to my own AFS account "luchini".
>THe .rhosts file in my account includes
>the the node name of the ioc I want to boot. 
>In addtion, the vxWorks image and startup 
>script loaded are also in AFS. The ioc did 
>boot successfully. However, I am uncertain
>if this is a definitive test. CDoes anyone
>else have some answers? Is there another test
>that I could do to verify that the move to 
>AFS will work. 
>
>This move to AFS will only affect our 
>development system. 
>
>Our group is currently running Tornado 1.0.1 but 
>will more than likely move to the latest 
>version of Tornado 2.0 at the end of the summer.
>
>Also, the Tornado 1.0.1 has been installed
>on AFS...so the tornado setup file points
>to afs links for WIND_BASE.
>
>As far as writting files if NFS goes away
>I believe that we can nfsMount one of
>our disks that is used for VMS. 
>
>

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System