[OpenAFS] Is OpenAFS appropriate?

[Jason C. Wells]

On Wed, 21 Jan 2004, Stephen Bosch wrote:

> Hi, everybody:

To answer your last question first, AFS is easy to administer on a day to
day basis.  Once it's up, it works.

To talk about some of the other issues you addressed, AFS is the only
system that provides certain features.  For me it was Kerberos, redundancy
and backup all in one package.  And remember AFS is a _distributed_ file
system and not merely a networked file system.  The distinction is
significant.

One can look at something supposedly simple to administer such as SMB, but
it doesn't provide the feature set.  Same with NFS.

As far as the complexity of AFS, I can agree with that, but let me offer a
counter argument.  AFS is a package of 5 or 6 servers.  If you wanted to
get any other networked file system to do what AFS does, you would bleed
from your eyeballs, your ears, your belly button, and your toenails.

BTW, The "bleeding" comment was from someone who was an early adopter
several years ago.  That was a "back when I was your age we flipped the
gates on the computer with hydraulics" type of comment.

If you learned how to implement AFS, you learned just about everything one
needs to learn about doing system administration.  That is a ton of
knowledge so of course it's a steep learning curve.

Later,
Jason C. Wells