[OpenAFS] possibly stupid question: why can't AFS serve "normal" directories like samba/nfs?

[Russ Allbery]

Adam Megacz <megacz@cs.berkeley.edu> writes:

> It's always made me a bit nervous that AFS keeps the data on the
> server's disk in a nonstandard format, but there must be a good reason
> for this.  Why doesn't the afs server just serve files out of a "plain
> old directory structure" like nfsd, smbd, and the rest?

One of the primary reasons why many of us run AFS is for its volume
management and location independent properties.  How do you handle
volumes, including transparent volume moves, replicated volumes, and
volume quota, when serving data out of a regular Unix file system?

I suppose that it's theoretically doable, but it smells like a ton of work
to me.  And AFS without transparent volume management is not AFS; you may
as well just run NFS with ACLs.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>