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- From: geoff@tyger.Eng.Sun.COM (Geoff Arnold @ Sun BOS - R.H. coast near the top)
- Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.ibmpc
- Subject: Re: TSRs ...
- Date: 4 Sep 1992 07:32:51 GMT
- Organization: SunSelect
- Lines: 34
- Message-ID: <1873f3INNk31@seven-up.East.Sun.COM>
- References: <Btx5J4.2tD@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca> <1992Sep2.130319.862@aspentec.com> <Btyu2v.AG3@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca> <1992Sep3.121205.863@aspentec.com>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: tyger.east.sun.com
-
- Quoth tto@aspentec.com (in <1992Sep3.121205.863@aspentec.com>):
- #In article <Btyu2v.AG3@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca>,
- #eengelke@sail.uwaterloo.ca (Erick Engelke) writes:
- #> tto@aspentec.com writes:
- #
- #>>Another nice thing about FTP's PC/TCP package is that it allows an easy
- #>>access to the global file descriptors. With other packages one has
- #>>to do more work in order to share a descriptor among several applications.
- #>>(By the way, sharing file descriptors is one of the few things that can
- #>>be done more easily on DOS than on Unix.)
- #>
- #> Yes, most of the others require you to change your PSP back to the
- #> originator's. That's easy enough when they provide source, but the
- #> one's that don't are a true headache because you have to reverse engineer
- #> or run through hoola hoops just to do shared access.
-
- In the case of PC-NFS, the reason you have to switch to the owner's
- PSP is because our socket handles are real file descriptors - you can
- read and write them using DOS calls. (When you referred earlier to
- FTP's "global file descriptors" you should have called them "private
- non-file socket descriptors".) Now you can argue whether or not having
- sockets be "real files" is more useful than having the freedom to
- manipulate descriptors at will - it certainly takes a lot of extra
- work on our part - but we found that we had a lot of Unix stuff
- to port which assumed that sockets were streams... And if sockets
- are (DOS) files, then you can't get around the need to switch PSP's.
-
- Geoff
-
- --
- Geoff Arnold, PC-NFS architect, Sun Select. (geoff.arnold@East.Sun.COM)
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