From: martelli@cadlab.sublink.org (Alex Martelli)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.nfs
Subject: Re: What are the advantages and disadvantages of B+Wnfs v
Date: 1 Oct 92 15:56:38 GMT
Organization: CAD.LAB S.p.A., Bologna, Italia

nils@aurora.f109f.mil.se (Nils Hammar) writes:
	...
:  > > o)    Support.  B&W hasn't let me down yet; then again, you rarely need
:  > >       to call them.  Sun is, well, Sun -- this has both good and bad
:  > >       points.
:  > 
:  >         Somehow I doubt any pricipal employee from Sun would ever contact
:  >         me directly.  I have, however, received mail from Mr. Whiteside.
:  >         Turned out to be very useful mail, at that.
:
:What about support outside the US?

I've only had 1 single copy of BWNFS, and only for a little while, but so
far for all my needs I've found them perfectly supportive by e-mail,
phone, and fax, despite the fact that I'm not in the US.  You get treated
exactly as if you were in the US... which is reasonable, considering that
B&W is Canadian so you or I are just as foreign to them as most of their
other customers:-). [as an aside, I wonder what it is that makes little
Canadian firms so wonderful in PC SW development - I couldn't live without
MKW Toolkit, or WATCOM 32-bit compilers, and I'm starting to get addicted
to BWNFS as well...:-)].

:  > The only thing I've liked anywhere near as much as B&W NFS was PC-Interface
:  > and at the time I had to make a decision, B&W NFS won hands down.
:
:I don't have any opinion yet, since I am using PC-NFS.

So am I, on by far the majority of the PC's at this site (which aren't many
anyway, we develop on Unix and only *port* to DOS) -- we're long-time PC-NFS
customers and are/were moderately satisfied with it for pure filesharing.

But now we must *port* network software Unix->PC, AND we must do it within
the parameters of the other tools we have chosen: WATCOM 32-bit compilers,
PharLap 32-bit extender rel 4.1, etc.  Sun, so we were told, does not
support these.

B&W - GET THIS! - sent with our single copy of BWNFS the SOURCE for their
("Excelan compatible", whatever that means) socket emulation at NO CHARGE!

No charge on the executables linked with it, either.  Which is the very
reason I had for buying a copy of BWNFS to evaluate.  It was quite an
interesting little adventure to port it to our 32-bit world (it does work
fine as compiled, out of the box, with 16-bit Watcom C), but early this
morning I found the last "fatal" bug (I'm sure there are still a few
minor ones, but they'll get exterminated too), and, wow!, finally this
afternoon I was able to see our homespun remote-SQL socket-based client
interact successfully with its counterpart on the Unix box... incidentally,
that "last" bug was that a DOS ioctl with AX=0x4403, which is supposed to 
WRITE commands to the device, also needs to READ back one answer byte on
the B&W drivers, and PharLap 4.1 didn't know about that and didn't copy
back the result byte, so I worked around it via the CALLBUF feature of
Pharlap (just in case anybody's struggling with this same problem:-).

That source as shipped also has incompatible number and type of parameters
on socket() and connect() wrt the BSD Unix standard, but that was easy
to change of course ***HAVING THE SOURCES (HURRAH!)***.  Less than 2000
lines of C source, thus easy to port to whatever one needs, too.

If more vendors included at least the KEY portions of sources with their
programmers' tools for customization, my life would be far easier (too
much is the time I've spent disassembling a tool to debug it!)... so BIG
kudos to B&W, and now I'm pushing with our upper mgmt to see that we
specify *it* to enable the network features of our applications in their
DOS-32bit ports (which will not be an easy job since it appears that B&W
has no reseller in Italy, sigh!, but I think I'll manage anyway).

BTW an apparently silly question, but I can't find the answer in the
manual: how do I use BW220 to do the same job as "telnet host port"
does from a Unix box?  I'll often need to do that to debug a protocol
or something...
-- 
Email: martelli@cadlab.sublink.org                   Phone: ++39 (51) 6130360
CAD.LAB s.p.a., v. Ronzani 7/29, Casalecchio, Italia   Fax: ++39 (51) 6130294