[OpenAFS] OpenAFS vs NFSv4?

[Daniel Joseph Barnhart Clark]

--On Monday, April 28, 2003 1:49 AM -0500 Ryan Underwood 
<nemesis-lists@icequake.net> wrote:

> It seems that NFSv4 does two-way authentication, encryption
> of the stream, and has a client side cache now.  I use AFS and love it
> to death, but can anyone provide a short list of features that NFS still
> misses from AFS so that I can give proper advice?

One important advantage of AFS is that it exists and has been in production 
for many years. NFSv4 is not yet supported on a large number of operating 
systems; on those systems where it is supported it is often experimental or 
an add-on, and in any case is less field-tested than AFS. The features you 
mention are in the RFC, but I'd double-check to make sure they are 
available in the specific implementations you are interested in using.

I don't believe NFSv4 addresses many of the administration advantages of 
AFS. I don't think there is provision for transparent data movement between 
servers, and I don't think there is namespace abstraction so you can move 
data between file servers without it being user-visible.

To get the NFSv4 perspective I'd wget [1] and look through it for mentions 
of AFS and OpenAFS. There are threads specifically about how/if AFS 
features should be implemented in NFSv4.

[1] NFS Version 4 Working Group Mailing List Archives - All
    http://playground.sun.com/pub/nfsv4/nfsv4-wg-archive/archive_all.txt

-- 
Daniel Joseph Barnhart Clark
http://www.pobox.com/users/dclark