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IBM Releases AFS
Raleel writes: "IBM has released the source code to AFS for AIX 4.2, Digital/Compaq UNIX 4.0, Red Hat Linux 6.2, Solaris 2.6 and 2.7, and Windows NT 4.0. You can download it from here. It is under IBM's Open Source license." This was supposed to be released a while ago, but it's good to see IBM following-thru. For more information, see our article regarding the open sourcing of AFS and the article from 1998 regarding the porting effort.
Once AFS is truly considered dead and no longer supported at all... there will still be some legacy systems around using it. Open source could possibly be the only avenue of support for these systems in the future.
> So... They're going to release it, and not support it. Joy...
Gee, next thing you know, IBM is going to stop supporting Linux, Emacs, gcc, flex, bison, and gmake, too!
Man, you're thick. Open Source means that they're releasing the source code in some free manner. It does not mean that they're opening their wallet.
If the authors of free software had to support it out of their own pockets, how much free software do you think there would be? How many people would actually bother to write any?
Imagine the world without it..
"Hello, GNU Software. This is Richard M. Stallman speaking."
"Yes, sir. I know you're having trouble with Emacs, but ever since Sun and Amdahl pulled their
code out, it hasn't been very stable under that platform. I think it's a bug with your vendor's crappy C compiler or their lexer, but since there is no other alternative cc or lex, I can't really narrow it down very well. I'm also really too busy manning the phones to code much these days...
"No, sir, there aren't any other support people here -- nobody else wants to work for free. I'm afraid you'll have to deal with me."
"Whoah! I'm sorry sir -- I have to go! Microsoft SourceSafe just ate my Emacs v5 source code -- boy I wish there was some sort of a revision control, or concurrent versioning system available for UNIX!"
[click]
>IBM - "We're releasing this, isn't this great?!"
>
>YOU- "wow, this is awesome, so how does bla bla bla..."
>
>IBM - "RTFM!"
It must suck to be illiterate. You have my condolences.
Personally, I'd much rather have a piece of code that I had to RTFS or RTFM to use rather than writing it from scratch myself. But then again, you're probably one of those "Gimme, Gimme!" Americans.
--
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Keep an eye on www.openafs.org. This is where the real action will be happening on this project, not at the ibm.com site.
Wangden
-- "You're not fooling me, young man - it's turtles all the way down!"
One of the things nice about what happened here is that a slew of documentation was released with the software - in general, I have noticed relatively sparse documentation around new open software. Not a complaint, just something I noticed.
AFS looks very cool. I've looked around at the FAQ and done some searching but I haven't been able to determine whether it supports SSL for transporting the raw data. However, I have observed that it supports secure authentication. Does AFS provide the capability to encrypt all data traffic with SSL? If not, might we have some luck including that feature now that the package has been open-sourced?
I don't get it. I suppose some people just like to piss and moan about how their asses aren't being correctly kissed on BOTH cheeks. WTF could there possibly be to complain about this announcement. AFS is great A robust distributed file system that was designed to handle huge gobs of data and huge numbers of users. And this is bad how?
If you think this is something to complain about then shut the fuck up and work on the code.
Everyone who knows Martin knows that he's a schizophrenic crack-addict. No right-minded person would desire a return to EZMAIL.
IIRC, Coda was originally under a BSD-style license which was changed to GPL 6-12 months after they started work.
This was posted to info-afs recently (subscritpion information at http://www.transarc.ibm.com/Support/common/mailing ListRequest.html , archive at http://www.mail-archive.com/info-afs@transarc.com/ )
From: Derrick J Brashear
To: info-afs@transarc.com
Subject: OpenAFS lists, cvs to be available at openafs.org
As soon as the relevant DNS changes happen, lists devoted to openafs development will be available at openafs.org, and a cvs archive will also be available. A preview of the site is available at www-openafs.central.org.
-D
It's nice that IBM has released OpenAFS two or so months after they said that it would be released, but a Free (libre) clone .
called ARLA has existed for sometime, and in my experience hasn't caused me any problems on several platforms, and is GPL'd
Also, arla supports many platforms, including (Free|Net|Open)BSD, and non x86 Linuxen, which Transarc (the IBM owned
company which actually develops AFS) hasn't bothered porting AFS to.
Arun
You can read about it here.
I found this interesting in their FAQ
"Will IBM support "Open AFS"?
IBM will support "IBM AFS" clients and servers for those customers who have active IBM AFS support contracts. IBM will not offer support services for Open AFS."
So... They're going to release it, and not support it. Joy...
IBM - "We're releasing this, isn't this great?!"
YOU- "wow, this is awesome, so how does bla bla bla..."
IBM - "RTFM!"
AFS stands for "Andrew File System", it's a network filesystem, and has little to do with IBM's journaled filesystem JFS and the effort to port it to Linux.
Someone moderate this bloke's post down as stupid.
Buddy, AFS might be old but that doesn't mean it is "dead".
AFS is a superior distributed file system which has a _proven_ track record. It has extensible ACL's. It has redundancy. It has fault tolerance. It is scalable. It has backing up built into its architecture. Kerberos fits nicely into the picture.
Let's say you have a large corporation, maybe you merged with other corporations. So now there's one corporation with all these departments that trust/might not trust eachother. Unix file permissions _break down horribly_ here whereas AFS shines. Just make groups for each corporation, add group names you trust to the ACL list of your directory and you're done. But that's not all, you can add individual users to your directory.
AFS is perfect for today's dot-coms who are now merging and forming huge corporations. And now that it is open source, it will be improved upon hopefully - not too familiar with the license.
Please read about AFS before posting ignorant-bad-big-corporation posts such as yours.
We should stand up and demand that they fully support Open Source by releasing code to viable products. If hundreds of thousands of programmers can do it every day we should expect the big guys to find a way to make it work.
lmao. Thank you for amusing me.
On my 2.2.16 box:
/usr/src/linux-2.2.5-15 does not exist.
/usr/src/linux-2.2.10 does not exist.
/usr/src/linux-2.2.12/include/linux/version.h does not exist.
/usr/src/linux-2.2.12-20 does not exist.
/usr/src/linux-2.2.13 does not exist.
/usr/src/linux-2.2.14/include/linux/version.h.
ERROR: Cannot build for Linux kernel 2.2.5-15:
ERROR: Cannot build for Linux kernel 2.2.10:
ERROR: Cannot build for Linux kernel 2.2.12:
ERROR: Cannot build for Linux kernel 2.2.12-20:
ERROR: Cannot build for Linux kernel 2.2.13:
ERROR: Cannot build for Linux kernel 2.2.14:
No UTS_RELEASE string found in
ERROR: Should be able to build at least one of 2.2.5-15 2.2.10 2.2.12 2.2.12-20 2.2.13 2.2.14.
Valid headers not present for any Linux kernel.
________________________________________
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
So, can anybody give me the skinny on any Free (libre) DMAPI/HSM work going on?
I don't get it. First they scrap their plans for the Crusoe laptop, then the open source AFS. And then they use an obscure prprietry license on their open sourcing which makes it next to useless for most Open Source apps.
Do they support Open Source or not?
Since AFS began at CMU prior to going to Transarc, it seems relevant to compare it to what came next. Coda is now the distributed filesystem pet project at CMU. Can someone compare/contrast the two?
Coda also appears to be at least partly GPL (or LGPL?), since it shows up in the kernel configurator. Was this a reaction to AFS going for-profit?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Also, their lawyers probably had to go through all the code and clear it. That's why it took so long for us (SGI) to open source XFS.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
In case you don't know what AFS is (wink, wink) and would like to know more, here is the AFS FAQ:
/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 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
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)
Its source not binaries.
Compile it yourself.
If you need to fix something, well, mail the ibm guys the fixes.
IBM isn't doing this? What about:
- SashXB (LGPL)
- JFS (GPL)
- Jikes (IBM Public License)
Or how about all the money IBM is pouring into Linux?- IBM invests $200M in Asia-Pacific Linux
- IBM Linux Wristwatch
- IBM's Overview of Linux (for investors)
- IBM banks on Linux
This has been but a selection of articles I could find in five minutes.---
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Thank you for updating my clue rating. Since the JFS is due very soon, I made the mistake of thinking that AFS was it.
sorry, my bad. It is free, but incompatible with the GPL. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/li cen se-list.html
Is it? I don't see it on that list. I see the IBM Public License listed as GPL incompatible, but that doesn't mean that the IBM Open Source license is the same.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
I've never understood this attitude. Especially in the context of the article, this strikes me as extremely ungrateful, rude and even childish. Something about Gift Horses and Mouths springs to mind.
You seem to be saying "Large companies whose business models include the concepts of selling and servicing software should immediately release their entire source code to the world at large". Without getting into the ethics, or the value of one business model over another, this attitude appears to be saying that the whole world should just stop what it's doing and obey the commands of a particular group of people.
Open Source / Free Software is a wonderfull, valuable, empowering movement. It's not the totality of the field, and it probably never will be. When corporations whose entire mindset involves the concept of exchange of cash for goods or services rendered embrace even a fraction of the values of these movements, it is indeed a cause for celebration. Not a time for beating them over the head that they haven't come all the way over from the Dark Side.
--
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
This is AFS. Not JFS. Two separate filesystems, doing different jobs. JFS for Linux hasn't been released yet. I believe it's due Real Soon Now.
--
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Because of the licencing, this can't be included in the core distribution of our favorite Linux flavours.
It's open, but not free.
---
Desperation is a stinky cologne
Can't you see past the "release" of the product forwards to the benefits that this can have.
AFS may well be a dead file system but there is no doubt that in it's open source state it will prove an invaluable teaching tool - not only for people that are interested in seeing how a file system works but also for people interested in seeing how IBM have written the code.
Yes it is a good bit of publicity for Big Blue but let's not let disdain for the motives of IBM's marketing department blind us to the other oportunities that their actions have presented.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
>1) Does IBM own Transarc? What's the deal here?
IBM bought Transarc in 1994 and ran it as a somewhat independent subsidiary until last year. In '99 Transarc was disolved into IBM and exists in name only as the IBM/Transarc Lab. Our jobs are pretty much the same but our checks say IBM now. Its a pretty cool place to work and we get paid pretty well for living in Pittsbugh.