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Distributed Filesystems for Linux?

Posted by Cliff on from the one-filesystem-many-hard-drives dept.

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 of 375 comments (clear)

  1. Re:N/T, OT: $00.2 -- That's 20 cents, actually. by El_Servas · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    NT

  2. Re:Mirroring file system by antarctican · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I usually use rsync for one way backups, and unison where I need 2 way synchronization.
    Rsync is nice because you can update lots of files very quickly, as it only moves binary diff's between files. Also, if it is a costly network link, you have the option to specify max transfer rates, so you don't kill your pipe when it runs from your cron job.
    Unison is nice because it is pretty smart about determining which files should be moved, and can correctly handle new and deleted files on either end of the link. Plus it supports doing all of it's comm via ssh, so it's secure.

    [too lazy to look it up myself]
    Can rsync run over ssh? I thought I'd once heard that rsync is a huge security hole. But I could be wrong....

  3. Re:If you Debian numbnuts... by vandan · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    1) Your post doesn't seem relevant to mine at all
    2) I AM using Gentoo.
    3) WTF?