*Distributed* Filesystem (was Re: [clug] Clustering Filesystem)

[Pietro Abate]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 03:13:05PM +1000, Alex Satrapa wrote:
> My (admittedly poorly developed) understanding is that a Coda client  
> will eventually end up with a copy of the entire file system - thus  
> Coda is a distributed/replicating file system. Samba + smbfs is not  
> an option, in my experience - smbfs squashes all the ownership and  
> permissions to be rwx by the user mounting the volume.

IIRC coda is a fs to be used for mobile computing. every client has a
cache (as big as you want, but it should be smaller than the master fs
itself). the coda architecture make sure that your cache always contains
all files that have been recently accessed and to maintain their
integrity on the master fs. The nice feature of coda is that if you
disconnect your client from the network you can still access the entire
fs (as long as it is in the cache) and all modifications will be
reconciled later, when the network will become available again. Coda
has automatic algorithms to resolve conflicts, but is also has user
space tool to ask the user what to do with a specific file. Last time I
had a go with coda was about 5 years ago, and i guess many things has
changed... GSF (that is based on ASF as coda) should be more in line with
what you were looking for.

:)
p

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