[OpenAFS] Industrial Strength AFS Usage Details

[Derrick J Brashear]

On Mon, 23 Apr 2001 Phil.Moore@morganstanley.com wrote:

> Having said all of that, I think that the filesystem should be used
> for files.  Distributed filesystems are not very good IPC mechanisms,
> and you should probably step back and ask yourself if this is right
> architecture to begin with.  Sure, you can probably make it work, but
> my intuition (and 7+ years of experience with AFS, and 15+ years of
> experience with *ultra* large scale systems) says otherwise.

Likewise, we (Carnegie Mellon Computing Services, a.k.a. "andrew") have a
history of abusing AFS for things like IPC, or more precisely, for
everything we could throw into it. Like Phil, I'd say AFS makes a fine
distributed filesystem, and if what you want is not a distributed
filesystem you'll be happier not to try to make AFS into something else. 

But I'm not sure that's really what you were asking.

-D