[OpenAFS] What filesystem?

[Horst Birthelmer]

On Mar 4, 2006, at 11:46 AM, Christopher D. Clausen wrote:
> Horst Birthelmer <horst@riback.net> wrote:
>> On Mar 3, 2006, at 11:30 PM, Volker Lendecke wrote:
>>> If you have one or two servers, AFS probably is not worth
>>> the hassle. But AFS really pays off when you run out of
>>> fingers to count your servers. I see the initial cost in
>>> particular when you're new to AFS as relatively high, but in
>>> the long run with a lot of servers around the world, you
>>> will start to love it.
>>>
>> I just wanted to add, that if you reach that size Volker was talking
>> about, you also ran out of options.
>> AFS is the only file system being able to help you in that case.
>
> Microsoft's Dfs should scale as well.  Of course, it essentially  
> only works on Windows, but if you are mostly a Windows shop, it may  
> be the best way to go.  I am a particular fan of the multi-master  
> read-write replication possibilities it offers, something that is  
> not currently possible with OpenAFS.  And MS Dfs is suposed to get  
> even better in Windows 2003 R2.

My experience with DFS is very limited (I actually didn't have more  
than a few contacts with it), but is there any possibility for an  
administrator to move any of the shared data transparently to a new  
location without all the clients to notice?
Is there any possibility to manage the 'shares' at all?

I'm a little confused how and why that's a match for AFS. We were  
talking about a large worldwide installation with possible  
mountpoints from different cells etc.

I quickread some of the information from Microsoft on this topic but  
didn't find any information about any improvements of DFS beyond that  
'name service' for windows fileservers. (well, it's over simplified,  
I know)


> Some will argue that the "last write wins" algorithm it uses isn't  
> a good idea, but for user home directories I think it is the best  
> thing to do and possibly the only solution out there for Windows.
Those algorithms weren't point here ... ;-)

> If there are further questions, I'd suggest discussions on the  
> #openafs IRC channel on the freenode network.

I know about the channel. I'm in there, too, most of the time, but  
not that active ;-) Sorry.


Horst