The TCP/IP Guide  9  TCP/IP Application Layer Protocols, Services and Applications (OSI Layers 5, 6 and 7)       9  Network File and Resource Sharing Protocols and the TCP/IP Network File System (NFS)            9  TCP/IP Network File System (NFS)

NFS Data Storage and Data Types, and the External Data Representation (XDR) Standard 1 2 3 NFS Server Procedures and Operations

Almost all applications deal with files and other resources. When a software program on a particular computer wants to read a file, write a file or perform related tasks, it needs to use the correct software instructions for this purpose. It would be inefficient to require each software program to contain a copy of these instructions, so instead, they are encoded as standardized software modules, sometimes called procedures. To perform an action, a piece of software calls the procedure; the procedure temporarily takes over for the main program and performs a task such as reading or writing data. The procedure then returns control of the program back to the software that called it, and optionally, returns data as well.

Since the key concept of NFS was to make remote file access look like local file access, it was designed around the use of a network-based version of the procedure calling method just described. A software application that wants to do something with a file still makes a procedure call, but it makes the call to a procedure on a different computer instead of the local one. A special set of routines is used to handle the transmission of the call across the network, in a way largely invisible to software performing the call.

This functionality could have been implemented directly in NFS, but instead Sun created a separate session-layer protocol component called the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) specification, which defines how this works. RPC was originally created as a subcomponent of NFS, but is generic enough and useful enough that it has been used for other client/server applications in TCP/IP. For this reason, it is really considered in many respects a distinct protocol.

Because RPC is the actual process of communicating in NFS, NFS itself is different from many other TCP/IP protocols. Its operation can't be described in terms of specific message exchanges and state diagrams the way a protocol like HTTP or DHCP or even TCP can, because RPC does all of that. NFS is in fact defined in terms of a set of RPC server procedures and operations that an NFS server makes available to NFS clients. These procedures and operations each allow a particular type of action to be taken on a file, such as reading from it, writing to it or deleting it.

NFS Data Storage and Data Types, and the External Data Representation (XDR) Standard 1 2 3 NFS Server Procedures and Operations