[OpenAFS] Puzzler: lack of access to AFS files

[Jeffrey Altman]

Rodney M. Dyer wrote:

> Well mine are clearly data integrity and reliability.  Speed is
> important, but speed without some guarantee of data integrity is
> pointless.  Over the years of using AFS on Windows, we've seen more
> issues related to data integrity than we should have seen compared to
> other network file systems, and I've regarded this as disturbing.  Much
> more effort needs to go into thoroughly throttling the file system to
> check for data irregularities and file lookup glitches between the
> clients and the file servers, than opting for speed improvements.

I disagree.  We need more resources for testing a broader range of
scenarios than we currently have available.  The performance
improvements must be implemented or you absolutely should go find
something else to use.

If we can't get to the point where operations are as fast or faster than
NFS or CIFS and if we can't support all of the application operations
they support and if we can't scale to the number of clients per server
and requests per second that they can scale to, you might as well go
find something new.

> I know some of the problems are due to how the Windows client works
> compared to the 'nix client, but the 'nix clients have shown themselves
> to be very reliable.

We do the very best we can with the resources available on all of our
supported platforms.  We wish we could do a better job than we have but
at the same time we are very proud of what we have accomplished.  Its
not like we have Sun investing hundreds of millions of dollars in our
file system.

I'm sorry whenever anyone has problems with the code.  We work as hard
as we can to fix things when issues are uncovered.  Some are easy to fix
and others are harder.

Jeffrey Altman