better network filesystems

Volker Lendecke Volker.Lendecke at SerNet.DE
Tue Dec 7 06:33:36 GMT 2004


On Mon, Dec 06, 2004 at 09:22:46PM -0600, Steve French wrote:
> I wonder if many realize how many of these interesting fs features are 
> already possible in the smb/cifs protocols - now.

There's two things I particularly like with AFS:

Location transparence: Everything is mounted under /afs, if you have lots of
servers, no client must be explicitly configured. We already have this with
MS-DFS.

Built on /afs, the real killer from my point of view is 'vos move'. While being
operated on, data can be moved across servers, all clients are notified. This
can't be done without protocol extensions. All clients must be informed that an
open file is about to be moved, and that the share-modes and/or byte range
locks must be re-acquired. Or else a simple notification about the move to a
different server might be enough as long as the servers talk closely enough to
each other. I could very well imagine an extension of cifs->samba that this
only works if the client opens a file in very limited ways (no share modes for
example.).

Volker
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-technical/attachments/20041207/61a81754/attachment.bin


More information about the samba-technical mailing list