CIFS? Really?

CIFS? Really?

Posted Feb 15, 2007 6:00 UTC (Thu) by k8to (subscriber, #15413)
In reply to: CIFS? Really? by drag
Parent article: Why a secret patent deal won't help Linux/Windows (LinuxWorld)

Some random comments.

Coda may be dead, but it claims that it is not. Some of the researchers inside CMU are trying to get it a bit more produciton ready and float it into the wider community. I too thought it was dead until recently, and it may only be on life-support, but they're trying.

AFS, Coda, and even Lustre all fail for the case of a small network. Say a family-sized network. They all require dedicated storage volumes which means planning ahead and some kind of information management person. The case of "I want to make this directory available read-only to my mom and sister" seems to be handled poorly by every protocol. NFS has no reasonable user selection, CIFS has a baroque windows-oriented user selection. They all have poor error messages and involve lots of reading log files to get things working.

It really would be nice to have a relatively easy to set up network filesystem that could work with sane semantics in a heterogeneous way. I guess this is a hard problem though since semantics on some platforms are insane. Huge bonus points for pleasant behavior in disconnect state.

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