In article <199707231908.PAA13174@jekyll.piermont.com> you write:
> 
> state, and not on server state. NFS was designed to be fully
> stateless, and file handles only become stale if you do something like

Without starting on an anti-NFS rant, I'll point out that a filesystem
is a state store, and a filesystem server is a state server.  A
"stateless state-server" is by definition either totally useless or not
actually stateless.  I think the failure of the designers to realise thie
is the reason for some of the long-standing problems with NFS (locking,
in particular).