On Wednesday, September 17, 2014 09:05:09 PM James wrote:

> J. Roeleveld <joost <at> antarean.org> writes:

> > AFS has caching and can survive temporary disappearance of the server.

>

> Excellent for low bandwidth connections. Most DFS have mechanisms to

> deal with transient failures, but not as generaous on the time-scale

> as AFS. I believe, if I recall correctly, these hi-latency, low bandwith

> recovery mechanism keen design paramters, at least bake in the

> CMU develop cycples, for AFS?

>

> While attractive for your situation, these features might actually

> be detrimental to a hi_performance distributed cluster's needs for

> a DFS?

I tend to agree. I'm not sure how up-to-date AFS is, but from re-reading the wikipedia pages, it sounds like what I need. Provided I can get it to work together with Samba. I need to allow MS Windows laptops access to the files on the remote location.

> > For me, I need to be able to provide Samba filesharing on top of that

> > layer on 2 different locations as I don't see the network bandwidth to

> > be sufficient for normal operations. (ADSL uplinks tend to be dead slow)

>

> Yea, I'm not going to be testing OpenAFS for my needs, unless I read

> some compelling publish data on it's applicability to high end

> clusters best choice as a DFS.....

I wouldn't either.

> It's probably great for SETI etc etc.

Doubtful :)

Did you see the following wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_systems

It contains a nice long list of various distributed, clustered,.... filesystems.

I just miss an indication on how well these are still supported and on which OSs these (can) work.

--

Joost