Genral Web Comments
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
Distributed Data Storage on a LAN?
AFS (Score:3, Informative)
by Reeses (5069) on Wednesday October 29, @04:18PM (#7341374)
It's called the Andrew File System.
http://www.psc.edu/general/filesys/afs/afs.html
There's another alternative with a different name, but I forget what it's called.
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Re:AFS (Score:1)
by Reeses (5069) on Wednesday October 29, @04:24PM (#7341443)
Whee.. replying to my own post... In addition to AFS...
Coda:
http://coda.cs.cmu.edu/
and InterMezzo:
http://www.inter-mezzo.org/
and there's a review here:
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/436 1/1/
Although, honestly, a 5 second search on google for "distributed filesystem" would have turned this up.
Ah, well.
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Re:AFS (Score:1)
by wetshoe (683261) on Wednesday October 29, @04:25PM (#7341456)
I'd have to agree, AFS is a great solution. I actually thought of this about a year ago, and I told a co-worker about it. He told me it had already been implemented, and as it turns out, it was, it's AFS.
AFS is actually pretty cool. You can run a file server that uses all this disk space of all the client machines. It's a great idea now, especially since most new machines come with 40GB hard drives, and most people don't use anything more then 5GB.
AFS is a wonderful solution to not only this problem that the poster is talking about, but it can be used in so many other interesting ways.
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Re:AFS (Score:5, Interesting)
by fireboy1919 (257783)
(http://rustyp.freeshell.org/ | Last Journal: Tuesday April 29, @09:22AM)
In my experience, it's one of those "it would be a wonderful thing if it worked."
It requires it's own partition for each mount of it; you can't just share disks you've already got.
Setup also takes hours, and it probably won't work the first time. Online documentation is incredibly outdated, which doesn't help matters at all. It also takes a hefty chunk of computer to run it, because it requires a lot of watchdog type programs to fix the frequent corruption that happens to it as you use it.
The servers time has to be matched exactly, so it's also best if you've got an NTP server running and clients on all the machines.
It's also about ten times slower than Samba (which you might use instead to share with Windows machines), and it chokes when you try to move/copy/delete large files.
I tried it for a month before it completely corrupted it's own partition and I switched back to NFS and Samba.
I can't wait for the day when these problems are but a memory and such a system works flawlessly.
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Re:AFS by pHDNgell (Score:2) Wednesday October 29, @05:26PM
Re:AFS (damn) by pHDNgell (Score:2) Wednesday October 29, @05:28PM
Re:AFS by Umrick (Score:2) Wednesday October 29, @05:31PM
Re:AFS by ipjohnson (Score:1) Wednesday October 29, @06:10PM
Re:AFS by rivaldufus (Score:1) Wednesday October 29, @06:30PM
Re:AFS (Score:1)
by kaybi (261428) on Wednesday October 29, @04:26PM (#7341462)
OpenAFS
http://openafs.org/ [openafs.org]
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Re:AFS (Score:3, Informative)
by Strange Ranger (454494) on Wednesday October 29, @05:24PM (#7341980)
from karmak.org
AFS is based on a distributed file system originally developed under a different name in the mid-1980's at the Information Technology Center of Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU). It was first publically described in a paper in 1985, and soon afterwords was renamed to the "Andrew File System" in honor of the patrons of CMU, Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon. As interest in AFS grew, CMU spawned the Transarc Company to develop and market AFS. Once Transarc was formed and AFS became a product, the "Andrew" was dropped to indicate that AFS had gone beyond the Andrew research project and had become a supported, product quality filesystem. However, there were a number of existing cells that rooted their filesystem as /afs. At the time, changing the root of the filesystem was a non-trivial undertaking. So, to save the early AFS sites from having to rename their filesystem, AFS remained as the name and filesystem root. In the late 1990's Transarc was acquired by IBM, who subsequently re-released AFS under an open source license. This code became the foundation for OpenAFS, which is currently under active development.
It's still running and running well at CMU (AFAIK - as of late 90's). Every student gets an "Andrew" ID. Actually the very first networked computer I ever logged into (other than dialing a bbs) was a 'node' on Andrew, in 1988. Very very cool at the time, and still is.
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Re:AFS (Score:1)
by RageEar (57236)
(http://rageear.com/)
I worked for a company that used this on all of our *NIX based servers. I never ran into too many problems as an end user and when I did they were easily fixed.
However, talking to our IT director, he said it was one of the biggest pains in the ass to administer. He was forced into using this system by the VP of Engineering, because said VP was an alum from CMU. The IT director wanted nothing more to switch over to an NFS/filer based solution.
Just my two cents.
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