Using RSH, FTP, or NFS, applications running under VxWorks can access files on any host development system (over the network) exactly as if they were local to the VxWorks system. For example, /dk0/file might be a file local to the VxWorks system, while /host/file might be a file located on another machine entirely. To VxWorks applications, the files operate in exactly the same way; only the name is different. Transparent file access is available through any of three different protocols:¹

• Remote Shell (RSH) is serviced by the remote shell daemon rshd on the host system. See the reference entry for remLib.

• Internet File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client and server functions are provided with a library of routines in ftpLib to transfer files between FTP servers on the network and invoke other FTP functions. See the reference entries for ftpLib and ftpdLib.

• Network File System (NFS) client protocol is implemented in the I/O driver nfsDrv to access files on any NFS server on the network. This I/O driver was tested with many different implementations of NFS file servers on various operating systems. The NFS server protocol is implemented (for dosFs file systems) in two libraries, mountLib and nfsdLib.

An alternative remote file transfer protocol is the Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP). The VxWorks implementation provides both client and server functions, and is used only to retrieve a VxWorks image at boot time. See the reference entries for tftpLib and tftpdLib.

1:  If you are developing on a Windows host, check your Windows and networking software documentation for information on which of these protocols is available and how to use them.