tlug: Never mind the NFS, here come the CODA archives!

[Frank Bennett <bennett@example.com>]

Dismayed by the discovery that NFS requires that my users know
and trust one another, I have spent my lunchtime trawling for
alternative ways of centralizing data storage inside the Law
Faculty here.  I had heard about AFS and its successor DFS, but
then I found that there's no Linux server for either, and a
client only for AFS.

What I then turned up, just in case anyone on the planet (let
alone the TLUG list) has not yet heard of it, is CODA.  This is a
freely available AFS-like distributed filesystem (seems to be a
spin-off of AFS, in fact) with the nifty added feature of
disconnected operation, which is supposed to respond to the needs
of laptop users and cope with network outages to boot.

This could answer another need that's been nagging at me --- lazy
users who don't back up their data.  You could give them a
working area under CODA, and let them think it's on their local
machine.  Then the server is set up to keep a tape backup of the
central filespace, against the day when they drop their laptop in
the bathwater.

This would also answer the question "how to I update my Web pages
on the server?"  Hmm.  The more I think about this, the more I
like it.

Code is available from:

  ftp://ftp.coda.cs.cmu.edu/pub/coda

Info is available from:

  http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu

(They're even working on porting this to Windows 95 and NT.)

Cheers,
-- 
-x80
Frank G Bennett, Jr         @@
Faculty of Law, Nagoya Univ () email: bennett@example.com
Tel: +81[(0)52]789-2239     () WWW:   http://rumple.soas.ac.uk/~bennett/
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