[OpenAFS] OpenAFS future ramblings

[Ryan Underwood]

hi,

> [ What would probably be most handy here is
>   if you had some sort of ability, on a per-machine basis, to mount
>   local machine file space under AFS.  By making this part of the cache
>   manager, and not part of AFS, I think that elimates most of the problems.
>   Whether it's still worth it is another question. ]

Actually, this would be sort of nice because then you could repeat
cdroms and other mounts (perhaps even other network mounts) in part
of your AFS namespace.  That's another "feature" of other network
filesystems that I forgot to mention.

> Per-file acls would (IMHO) be more valuable.

Yeah, I think DFS does this.  But I would definitely want it to be enabled
or disabled on a site policy basis.  Some people complain about lack of fine-grained
ACLs in AFS, but I think the simplicity of permissions is one of AFS's strengths
in a lot of environments.  (It certainly helps the scalability of the admins!)

> Record locking is hard to solve on a network-wide basis.  Unix "lockf"
> semantics aren't a good match for the problem. 

Yeah.  I wonder how SMB gets away with network record locking, when
it seems to be a pain in the butt to every other network filesystem.

> I think arla has the most interesting approach here: simple generic kernel
> interface, most of the complexity in userland.

I found the info about kAFS; apparently, it is a Red Hat project, or at least
as it was discussed on the mailing list.
Thread here:
https://lists.openafs.org/pipermail/openafs-info/2002-August/005611.html


-- 
Ryan Underwood, <nemesis at icequake.net>, icq=10317253