NFS prior to version 4.1 only stored data on the NFS server?

Question

linux

Good afternoon!
I have a question.
In NFS prior to version 4.1, only the NFS server could store data?
Or was it some kind of GateWay (with metadata, and the files themselves were on the clients), to which the clients accessed, he, based on his table, sent clients to the real location of the file?
And what happens if there are several clients in the network, and there are nodes that are both clients and servers at the same time - how is the data stored then?

Answer 1

NFS does not store data or files.
it only provides access to files located on the server's file system.
how they are stored and where NFS comes from without a difference.

Answer 2

NFS was never a gateway. And he did not store anything on clients. All responsibility, both for the files, and for their location, and for their distribution, lay only on the server. Actually, it's the same with NFS 4.1, with the exception of PNFS, but nothing is stored there on the client either.
If there are several clients on the network, as we have, for example, 5 NFS servers and about 30 clients, all data is located on the servers themselves, clients access them over the network. If clients simultaneously access the same resource, then blocking occurs on the server side, which resolves the order in which clients access shared resources. Conflicts can also arise here, but this is rare and it all depends on the read-write mode of specific applications.
In fact, NFS is one of the components (application) on top of the RPC protocol with all the consequences ... It is a client-server binary "remote procedure call" protocol.
Here it is relatively intelligibly stated - https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_File_System