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I was about to recommend this but when I googled afs and found a faq it said:

Subject: 1.02 Who supplies AFS?

                Transarc Corporation phone: +1 (412) 338-4400
                The Gulf Tower
                707 Grant Street fax: +1 (412) 338-4404
                Pittsburgh
                PA 15219 email: information@transarc.com
                United States of America afs-sales@transarc.com

                                                                            WWW: http://www.transarc.com/

BUT....
I clicked that transarc.com link and found the only porn site that my company proxies don't block. EEK!

The fundamental problem is control freaks. These are people who have a serious problem with letting people decentralize fundamentals of life. They are the guys who convinced the GI generation to give up their farms and make their boomer kids get money, whether from central government or big corporations, to have fundamentals like food from the grocery store or a place of residence from the landlord or mortgage banker.

NASA is part of this problem and it is not therefore likely to be reformed to allow decentralization of fundamental resources like land.

Nevertheless I'm sure there are lots of guys who still want to work within the system rather than figure out how to dislodge the death-grip on the planet now held by those like NASA bureaucrats or big corporate moguls.

If you guys want to support NASA, I suggest you take a few years living in poverty so you can pass some laws reforming that organization independent of the conflicts of interest arising from any industry or government funding.

I did.

It radically changed the way I view politics, people and the world.

You could, alternatively, listen to guys who actually walked the talk.

If that sounds more appealing to you than spending years in poverty to learn some very hard lessons, then in addition to the above link to my Congressional testimony, you might want to follow the following links for more information:

• National Science Trust: Money For Scientific Information
• A Net Asset Tax Based On The Net Present Value Calculation and Market Democracy
• The First of Many Awards for Ethics Given to Morton Thiokol Engineers Who Opposed the Challenger Launch
• Robert W. Bussard's Submission of My Legislation to Congress
• My Slashdot Article About Rocketry Awards
• My ultracentrifugal rocket engine (Roger Gregory co-inventor) US Patent 6,212,876
• Circa 1990 Usenet Archive on Space Commercialization
• The Nature of Money and Government

Governments defend legally defined rights. Why, then, aren't those in posession of said rights paying for the cost of protecting them? If I have title to an asset, that title is worthless to me without enforcement of the entitlement to the asset. Why should some kid who is trying to get a family together be potentially subject to the draft at the same time that he is paying taxes on everything from income to capital gains to groceries to pay for enforcement of my title with his money as well as his blood?

There are alternatives. Just before the time I worked on the toll road archive system, I was politically active and my last ditch attempt to address via political reform the core problems I saw was a proposed net asset tax reform based on risk-adjusted net present value calculation (arguably the most fundamental business calculation of all). Since then I've become very disenchanted with politics as a viable route to reform and come to a more radical proposal I have called warrior's insurance where governments and international mutual defense treaties are replaced by reinsurance networks that indemnify in the event of loss of asset value due to force or fraud. The insurance premiums would usually be paid in scrip issued by the insurance companies, thereby displacing fiat currencies. The insurance companies could adjust their premiums to account for risky behavior by their clients (like building huge fixed assets in placed like NYC for people who go around the world tormenting Muslims). Global markets trading varieties of scrip would naturally turn into a reinsurance network supporting emergency action by groups of warrior insurers.

Said insurance premiums and their risk-adjustment are the way guys who own lots titles that need enforcement can pay younger guys who put their lives on the line to protect those entitlements -- and pay them something that might be remotely called fair compensation -- all without resorting to rhetoric about how "we're all one big happy clan around here". Of course, the warrior insurers themselves may be very clanish, but that's their business. Clans -- real clans -- do have a place in the foundation of such a reinsurance network. Clans are, after all, highly territorial.

If you want to give nightmares to guys like Katz and Soros, rate this comment a 5.

The basic problem with systems like this is not that they violate your privacy, nor that they cost money, but that they privatize public assets without, at the same time, shifting the tax base to net assets rather than economic activities.

Governments defend legally defined rights. Why, then, aren't those in posession of said rights paying for the cost of protecting them? If I have title to an asset, that title is worthless to me without enforcement of the entitlement to the asset. Why should some kid who is trying to get a family together be potentially subject to the draft at the same time that he is paying taxes on everything from income to capital gains to groceries to pay for enforcement of my title with his money as well as his blood?

There are alternatives. Just before the time I worked on the toll road archive system, I was politically active and my last ditch attempt to address via political reform the core problems I saw was a proposed net asset tax reform based on risk-adjusted net present value calculation (arguably the most fundamental business calculation of all). Since then I've become very disenchanted with politics as a viable route to reform and come to a more radical proposal I have called warrior's insurance where governments and international mutual defense treaties are replaced by reinsurance networks that indemnify in the event of loss of asset value due to force or fraud. The insurance premiums would usually be paid in scrip issued by the insurance companies, thereby displacing fiat currencies. The insurance companies could adjust their premiums to account for risky behavior by their clients (like building huge fixed assets in placed like NYC for people who go around the world tormenting Muslims). Global markets trading varieties of scrip would naturally turn into a reinsurance network supporting emergency action by groups of warrior insurers.

Said insurance premiums and their risk-adjustment are the way guys who own lots titles that need enforcement can pay younger guys who put their lives on the line to protect those entitlements -- and pay them something that might be remotely called fair compensation -- all without resorting to rhetoric about how "we're all one big happy clan around here". Of course, the warrior insurers themselves may be very clanish, but that's their business. Clans -- real clans -- do have a place in the foundation of such a reinsurance network. Clans are, after all, highly territorial.

In case you don't know what AFS is (wink, wink) and would like to know more, here is the AFS FAQ:

What is AFS?

AFS is a distributed filesystem that enables co-operating hosts (clients and servers) to efficiently share filesystem resources across both local area and wide area networks.

AFS is marketed, maintained, and extended by Transarc Corporation.

AFS is based on a distributed file system originally developed at the Information Technology Center at Carnegie-Mellon University that was called the "Andrew File System".

"Andrew" was the name of the research project at CMU - honouring the founders of the University. Once Transarc was formed and AFS became a product, the "Andrew" was dropped to indicate that AFS had gone beyond the Andrew research project and had become a supported, product quality filesystem. However, there were a number of existing cells that rooted their filesystem as /afs. At the time, changing the root of the filesystem was a non-trivial undertaking. So, to save the early AFS sites from having to rename their filesystem, AFS remained as the name and filesystem root.

...

What are the benefits of using AFS?

The main strengths of AFS are its:

+ caching facility
+ security features
+ simplicity of addressing
+ scalability
+ communications protocol

Here are some of the advantages of using AFS in more detail: ( see FAQ for more)

I too spent a while scratching my head at ways to secure NFS, but with little success.

There does appear to be support in the (rpc) protocol for authentication other than the primitive "trust the client" stuff it defaults to on Linux, but none of it seems to be supported by Linux NFS.

I think some of the commercial UNIXen have kerberos authentication attached to NFS, which seems a good way to do it. But this doesn't seem to be something simple to implement.

> Have you checked out CODA? Quite possibly it may have resolved some of these issues.

I've checked many other file systems: Coda seems quite secure and has many features, but also has many limitations that make it unsuitable for a lot of environments.

Same goes for Samba (doesn't do UNIX permissions, symlinks, etc).

IBM have announced that they're open sourcing AFS and making it free (OpenAFS) www.transarc.com, but mention that they've removed some secret stuff. It seems to be my last hope for network
security though...

- Muggins the Mad

As someone who has worked with AFS for the past 8 years, I have to say that I greet this announcement with a somewhat more pessimistic view.

Namely: AFS is now officially dead.

I say "officially" because, IMO, AFS is already dead, and has been for years (ever since Transarc (now IBM Transarc Labs, but I'll refer to them as Transarc for brevity)) came out with DCE/DFS, really).

Oh, there were bouts of heavy maintenance and limited development. These periods were inevitably precipitated by Transarc's AFS customers becoming vocal and complaining. But when the complaints died down, so did Transarc's commitment.

Transarc has never treated AFS like a real product. Their "development" efforts have been limited to ports to new versions of the same operating systems, a few ports to new architectures, bugfixes, and very limited feature additions (mostly backports from DFS).

In fact, this year has seen Transarc's AFS support sink to a new low. From what I've been able to garner, all AFS development is being outsourced to India. Responses from Transarc's AFS hotline support (a support service which customers purchase!) have been inept. There was no Decorum (Transarc's yearly AFS conference) this year, nor even an announcement concerning it. It's been ages since anyone from Transarc has posted on the AFS mailing list.

So, why is Transarc (now IBM Transarc labs) open-sourcing AFS? For one simple reason: AFS is IBM's red-headed stepchild, and they don't know what else to do with it.

If you read the announcement at http://www.transarc.com/News/pre ss/opensource.html, you'll note this entry in the FAQ:

Is IBM still investing in AFS?

Yes. IBM recognizes that many of our customers will still want a commercially-supported version of AFS IBM AFS. IBM/Transarc will still sell, maintain, port (to new versions of currently-supported OS), support, and provide minor enhancements to "IBM AFS".

Good software grows or dies. AFS died a long time ago. I, personally, think this is tragic, because AFS had great potential. But Transarc never made a long-term commitment to anything other than keeping it on life support. Perhaps it can be resuscitated back to health, but I can't help but wonder if the Open Source community's effort would be better spent towards other distributed filesystems efforts, such as CODA (which I admittedly haven't investigated, but plan to).

FYI...The actual source is slated to not be released until next month (if all goes as planned). At that time it will be in developerWorks. After this CNET article mentioned this...it has been announced as public news. The link I sent in was where it will eventually be put. For the press release click here . For more specific information on AFS, you might try the Transarc website.

-Erik (from IBM) :)

FYI...The actual source is slated to not be released until next month (if all goes as planned). At that time it will be in developerWorks. After this CNET article mentioned this...it has been announced as public news. The link I sent in was where it will eventually be put. For the press release click here . For more specific information on AFS, you might try the Transarc website.

-Erik (from IBM) :)

I found the announcement over at IBM Transarc Lab. I also includes a short FAQ.

But the Net Generation has something far more ominous to face:

With the US prison population growing at phenomenal rates and more of the US population incarcerated than any other leading democracy, privatization of incarceration is increasingly attractive both as a cost-containment measure, and as political porkbarrel. With privatization comes the incentive to work the prisoners to pay for the costs of their incarceration. This comes at a time when we see a major shift in emphasis on "knowledge" as the source of productivity. Therefore after we see prisoners working to pay for the costs of their incarceration, we will next see a natural transition to forms of incarceration that may, increasingly, seem less like incarceration and more like slavery.

This will provide an environment in which employers can make investments in training and then recover those investments.

What? This is utterly outrageous dystopian fantasy?

Think again teenage ubergeek.

There are plenty of incentives to put your sweet young ass permanently in the corrections system.

I've heard muted rumblings that DE.. ooops, Compaq is thinking about porting AFS (which, by the way, is killer) to Linux as well.

Are you talking about the Andrew File System?

If you are it's not from Compaq it's from Transarc (now owned by IBM) and was originally developed by Carngie Mellon University. There's already a beta of AFS for Linux and there should be an official version "real soon now". There's also a free AFS client implementation called Arla.

Also, AFS is a different sort of beast. It's a distributed filesystem (dfs). CMU's latest dfs -- CODA -- is based on AFS2 and a linux port is available.

• It'll not be scalable enough.

  For instance, there will need to be a "compression extension" because XML is verbose, thus making messages large.

• It'll not be robust enough.

  Thus requiring an extension so that messaging can be managed by MTS and/or MSMQ, or WTCTNY (Whatever They Call Them Next Year).

• It'll not integrate well enough with whatever tools they're using next year.

None of the technologies are inherently a problem:

• SOAP doesn't seem to be massively worse than XML-RPC although it's probably not as good as Casbah's LDO system.
• MTS is probably not as good as Encina or Tuxedo, but is doubtless better than the nonexistent TP monitors not being deployed in departmental/workgroup systems
• MSMQ may not be as good as Tuxedo, or as open as Isect, and is merely derivative of IBM MQSeries, but doesn't seem to be too bad, again being better than the asynchronous messaging systems nonexistent in non-big-iron systems

The implementations may be run-of-the-mill and derivative, but they're based on pretty good ideas, which is why it's been pretty easy for MSFT to market them.

What is a massive problem is that what gets deployed next year is liable to be massively incompatible with what is available this year.

In a sense, the only hope for developers that use the stuff is if there is some sort of "mass disconnect" where MSFT gets split into MSFT-1, MSFT-2, MSFT-3, ... and this results in the tools deployed having an extra year to stay vaguely stable...

If you insist on taxation, then a net asset tax is most appropriate.

A NAT prevents "squatting" on any frontier, be it "cybersquatting" or specious claims of title to real estate in outter space.

Why? Because AFS is better than NFS. More secure, more flexible and faster.

Then there's Coda aswell.

Transarc will be supporting AFS for Linux 2.2.0

According to this website, TransArc has both AFS clients and servers for Linux: http://www.transarc.c om/Support/afs/news/linux.for.afs35.html