Beta 2.5 kernel?

[warlord at MIT.EDU (Derek Atkins)]

Ron Peterson <ron.peterson at yellowbank.com> writes:

> Well, w/ nfs3 all I have to do is boot from a floppy and fake a uid.  At
> least smb makes it a /little/ harder...

Depends on how you have SMB setup...  

> > NFSv4 is probably fine for small clusters, but (last I heard) doesn't
> > have the volume management features of AFS.
> 
> Tell me more.

AFS has an abstraction layer over the location of a fileset.  An
administrator can move a fileset in real-time, and all clients will
find the new location.  I don't know if NFSv4 has just a concept.  If
you move the location of a fileset, I don't know if all clients will
recognize this and follow in real time.

> > I think AFS' only failure is lack of a reasonable marketing
> > department.
> 
> I've been using debian rather than RH lately, and now that I look I see
> all kinds of openafs-* packages are available.  Cool.  IIRC, last time I
> looked into it, I believe was using RH, and there was nothing I could
> 'up2date'.  Keeping lots of machines current can be a chore.  This is a
> big reason I've been turning to debian.  Red Hat has up2date, but I can
> more easily maintain a local debian mirror, blah blah

This is just that Red Hat does not distribute it.  There -ARE- RPMs
available.  If you run your own up2date server you could bring them
in.

> > > How do you set up a cluster of Linux workstations to have secure access
> > > to a shared filesystem?  It's a bitch.
> > 
> > Personally, I use AFS.  :)
> 
> OK, now that I see it may be easier than the last time I looked, I'm going to look
> into it.  Nice to know there's someone here using it.

*nods*   Lots of support -- try the openafs mailing lists..

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available