nfs mounted IBM mainframe filesystem

[Jeff Hoevenaar_1]

A NFS filesystem was set up on one of our systems by someone who is no longer
here. The following is the fstab entry:
ps02.rar.ncsus.jnj.com:/imsts.nfs,lf,nofastfilesize /imsts nfs rw,noquota 0 0

This entry does not seem correct to me but it seems to work. The location of
the options and the options themselves (lf,nofastfilesize) seem wrong.

When I do a bdf this is the output:
s02.rar.ncsus.jnj.com:/imsts.nfs,lf,nofastfilesize
120000 60000 60000 50% /imsts

Does anyone have any ideas on this?

[Paul Hite_2]

Well, I will take a guess. At mount time the string
"ps02.rar.ncsus.jnj.com:/imsts.nfs,lf,nofastfilesize" gets sent to the IBM. We
unix types are used to seeing only a host:path for this. But IBM is apparently
marching to a different drummer and used this as a sly way for the client to
send some extra screwy options to the server as well as specify the directory
to be mounted.

So I would leave it alone for now and try to confirm this with your mainframe
gurus. And I would add some comments describing this in fstab.

[Shannon Petry]

The way a mainframe and AS/400 work is very different from UNIX. Unless you understand them, you won't understand the reasoning behind the options of the mount. The command works because
mount $HOST:$PATH.arg1,arg2 /location
is interpreted as exactly that. The "." and "," are passed literally to the mainframe, which recognizes those arguments in it's NFS compatibility suite. It has Nothing to do with UNIX at all, except for the fact that is a UNIX client accessing it.

Regards,
Shannon