[OpenAFS] Re: [AFS3-std] Re: IBM will not re-license OpenAFS .xg files

[Russ Allbery]

chas williams - CONTRACTOR <chas@cmf.nrl.navy.mil> writes:

> And this is one of the shortcomings and strong points of AFS.  AFS
> provides (for the most part, with some exceptions related to caching)
> end to end protection (the end here being the actual user) of the user's
> data.  I suspect the reason for NFS and CIFS is that the admins for
> those machines don't need to install any new software.  They don't need
> to install some third-party client or setup some "complicated"
> authentication mechanism. It just works out of the box (and I guess the
> security is "good enough").

Another primary reason for NFS and CIFS is because the storage that you
purchase, at least if you're a larger institution, already speaks NFS and
CIFS.  I don't know how many times I've had a conversation that goes
something like "so, if we used NFS or CIFS, we could just plug this in and
it would work, but if we use this AFS thing that you want, we have to buy
an additional server and put it in front of the storage to re-export all
of the storage and introduce an additional point of failure and additional
complexity?  why would we want to do that?"

Again, it's another place where AFS needs to make a *proactive* case for
why it's *better*, not just a defensive case saying that it's no worse.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>