What is the Best Remote Filesystem?

GaelenBurns asks: "I've got a project that I'd like the Slashdot community's opinion of. We have two distant office buildings and a passel of windows users that need to be able to access the files on either office's Debian server from either location through Samba shares. We tend to think that AFS would be the best choice for mounting a remote file system and keeping data synchronized, but we're having trouble finding documentation that coherently explains installing AFS. Furthermore, NFS doesn't seem like a good option, since I've read that it doesn't fail gracefully should the net connection ever drop. Others, such as Coda and Intermezzo, seem to be stuck in development, and therefore aren't sufficiently stable. I know tools for this must exist, please enlighten me."

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I'm sorry I can't address your question for good remote filesystems in the face of an unreliable network. My network has been relatively reliable and that's been a decreasing concern. Perhaps network reliability will be less of a concern for you, too, in future.

Lately, what I've been looking for is a remote filesystem that provides performance, security, flexibility, the latter in reference to being able to log into someone else's desktop machine and easily get my home directory mounted, whether from a big server up 24x7, or from my desktop.

Some have dabbled with DCE/DFS, but I've heard that's slowly dieing, ponderous to set up, performance suffers.

SFS looks intriguing, but I haven't heard pro or con about its performance. It appears to be secure and flexible.

NFS is an old friend and, yes, if the network or the server dies, a lot of local sessions will hang interminably 'NFS server not responding'. But, this doesn't happen as much as it did 5 years ago.

Right now we're running NFS v3, but the new NFSv4 looks like it has a better security model.

Finally (and you shouldn't even think about this if network reliability is an issue), simple block service like iSCSI looks promising as a way of interchangeably moving around from desktop to desktop and getting your same home directory no matter where you are. More, you could conceivably even get your own flavor of OS booting, be it Red Hat 9, Win2K, XP, Gentoo, etc. Don't know about its security; it's heavily dependent on a reliable, high-performance network, but looks like a good way to get the most storage for your dollar (NAS instead of SAN).