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Domain: openafs.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to openafs.org.

Stories · 3

  1. Distributed Filesystem for Disconnected Operation?

    Ask · Storage · · posted by Cliff · from the disjointed-drives dept. · 58 comments
    juraj asks: "I'm trying to achieve the following setup: I have two offices connected via a relatively slow ADSL line, and I want a shared fileserver between the offices. I have VPN using IPSec ready, so security is less of a concern, but simply mounting a filesystem (via Samba or NFS) from one office to another is not a solution because of the speed. Also, the ADSL line is sometimes not only slow, but also disconnected. I've tried the CODA distributed filesystem to achieve replication, so that both offices have local copies of their files. The problem is, that the CODA filesystem is just a research project: it is unstable, with the venus daemon constantly falling, and sometimes when recovering from the disconnected state, one side does not recognize the changes and they are simply not propagated. Have you had any good experiences with CODA? Which versions do you use? What kind of setup did you have? How is it configured? I've also heard about OpenAFS, but similar to CODA, I've learned it is unusable in a real environment. Is there any real solution to my problem? Are there any decent solid free distributed file systems for Linux or the BSDs?"

  2. Distributed Filesystems for Linux?

    Linux · Linux · · posted by Cliff · from the one-filesystem-many-hard-drives dept. · 375 comments
    zoneball asks: "What would you use for a distributed file system for Linux? I have several GNU/Linix machines running at home, and wanted to be able to see more or less the same file tree (especially all the ~user directories) regardless of which machine I'm connected to, and where the traversal into the distributed file system space is largely transparent for the end-user. Are there any URLs or documents that compare the features, bugs, road map, stability of these and other distributed filesystems? Which offers the best stability and protection from future obsolescence?"

    Zoneball looked at 3 distributed filesystems, here are his thoughts:

    " Open AFS was the solution I chose because I have the experience with it from college. For performance, AFS was built with an intelligent client-side cache, but did not support network disconnects nicely. But there are other alternatives out there.

    Coda appears to be a research fork from an earlier version of AFS. Coda supports disconnected operations. But, the consensus on the Usenet (when I looked into filesystems a while ago) was that Coda was still too 'experimental.'

    Intermezzo looks like it was started with the lessons learned from Coda, but (again from Usenet) people have said that it is still too unstable and it crashes their servers. The last 'news' on their site is dated almost a year ago, so I don't even know if it's being developed or not"

    So if you were to recommend a distributed filesystem for Linux machines, would you choose one of the three filesystems listed here, or something else entirely?

  3. Is OpenAFS Robust Enough to Replace NFS?

    Ask · Linux · · posted by Cliff · from the evolution-of-the-network-filesystem dept. · 9 comments
    eskimoe asks: "Has anyone been playing with (OpenAFS) lately? It looks very promising and claims to be kinda stable now. Unfortunately Google didn't find any reviews when I last searched. This surprised me, considering what I would suspect to be a not-so-small percentage of sysadmins who would absolutely love a secure, not-as-broken-as-nfs, not-depending-on-braindead-RPC-stuff, not-relying-on-client-for-authentication network file system. The other available alternatives such as CODA, various nfs-patches/branches (generally addressing one NFS design-bug at a time while causing more problems) or SMB-only environments have never reached the state of functionality and usability necessary to actually become a serious NFS-killer. So, would you deploy AFS in a production environment, yet? Has anyone tried?"