[OpenAFS-devel] Re: Whats the status of the NT driver?

[Harald Barth]

Hej Bosse, Hi Nathan,

This seems to be a question of broader interrest, so I try to answer
it to all of you as good as I can. And yes, we do not like the
redirector stuff either.

bosse> I have read some papers about development of an Arla driver for Windows NT
bosse> and would like to ask about the status of the project?

I think all bits and pieces which are needed are there. However, as no
one in the core Arla team is too excited about Windows, we are not
sure if all the pieces are put together correctly. The command line
arla-cli basicly works and it is possible to make a file system device
(Z:). I think files have been read and written, too. The work came to
a stop when the folks got tired about all the gory NT details and the
remote kernel debugging hassle (run, crash, wait, go to lunch, come
back and find debugger ready for input) and the quite big setup with
serveral boxes to run this cycle on. With more NT experience and more
examples (THANKS BOSSE) this would have been easier. So work was put
into other target platforms of intrest (MacOSX) while recovering from
the NT experience. I for myself keep myself well seperated from NT
technology as I know that some things just do not mix. Bosse's example
will make it easier for whoever wants to pick up the Arla-NT-thread,
and of course we would be happy to see a person who is on good terms
with NT to do that. Help can as usual be provided for such a person
any non-office-hour (MET :-).

Harald.