[OpenAFS] File locking

[Daniel Wood]

Sorry if that came across wrong!  I do understand that other things will
have priority, and everyone's priorities are different.  Also yes, things
have come a long way for the Windows client.

I just don't entirely understand why large organisations don't find it as
important - I can still accept that they do and am not criticising the
directions your work takes.  Good luck with hitting 1.4!

Cheers,

Dan

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jeffrey Altman" <jaltman@secure-endpoints.com>
To: "Daniel Wood" <danw@compbook.co.uk>
Cc: <openafs-info@openafs.org>
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2005 4:55 PM
Subject: Re: [OpenAFS] File locking


> Daniel:
>
> People have been using AFS and NFS with Windows for over a decade
> without the byte-range locking.   There are things you simply should
> not do with it.
>
> There are many sites that for years have stored the users Windows
> profiles in AFS and take advantage of redirected folders.  People
> are certainly using AFS from Windows with read/write folders.  I
> certainly do.
>
> Would AFS be appropriate for a shared project directory from which
> multiple users edit Microsoft Office documents at the same time?
> At the current time the answer is 'no'.
>
> The other items are of higher priority because they affect extremely
> large organizations that are current users of AFS and have been for
> a very long time.   While I understand that this issue is a critical
> issue for you, it is not for hundreds of thousands of users that
> already have AFS deployed and might be forced to migrate to another
> distributed file system that currently does not exist simply because
>
> (a) there is no appearance of a "stable" product
>
> (b) recent regulations have imposed new auditing and security requirements
>
> (c) the use of AFS on Windows is for all practical purposes restricted
> to ASCII while their users come from hundreds of countries around the
globe.
>
> Your request is on the list.   If you look at all that has been
> accomplished over the last eighteen months you will see that we have
> come a long way.   I wonder if you would have even considered AFS at
> all on Windows at the end of 2003.
>
> Jeffrey Altman
>
>
> Daniel Wood wrote:
>
> > Thanks for the info,
> >
> > Just wondering, would it not require any changes to the server's locking
> > mechanisms as well as the client to accomplish this?
> >
> > Also, I'm surprised that it is not a higher priority since it seems a
rather
> > critical problem to us.  If this is not implemented then the other
features
> > are not usable at all due to the risk of data loss, whereas the converse
is
> > not true.  Do you know of many networks with Windows clients using
OpenAFS
> > that are working with read-write shares without problem?  Just curious
as to
> > whether most networks are using the read-only replication features, with
rw
> > volumes only for user directories or something like that (which is
something
> > we can't do unfortunately!).
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Dan
>
>



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