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mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphonemainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphonePosted Jun 23, 2012 5:19 UTC (Sat) by djao (subscriber, #4263)In reply to: mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone by theophrastus Parent article: Why We're Fighting for an Open Cloud (Linux.com) I think the lack of administrative overhead in the current generation of cloud services is a big difference compared to previous incarnations of NFS, telnet, ssh, and so on. With NFS, in addition to installing all the client and server software, you need to configure the server software, and on the client you need to know which server and which directory your remote filesystem resides on, and configure your client to mount this share manually. With distributed filesystems like AFS, the configuration steps are easier than NFS, but the initial installation of the software (especially on the server side) is a huge pain. The older protocols were not very robust. Of course they all required a working network connection on the part of the client. In addition, if your NFS or AFS server goes down, your client machines are left high and dry. If you compare NFS or AFS with Dropbox then you'll notice that Dropbox offers a big jump in functionality compared with the previous solutions. Now I am not a big fan of Dropbox and in fact I have some serious concerns about their approach to security and privacy, but I am speaking solely of functionality here. Dropbox involves no server administration whatsoever. They take care of all that for you. They even take care of backups (at least, I hope they do). On the client side, you need to install their program, and that's it. There is almost zero client configuration necessary -- just type in your username and password and you're done. It works everywhere: Windows, Mac, Linux, phones, tablets, you name it. If you're offline it will just sync your changes when you're back online. You can share a particular file or directory with any other user anywhere in the world, with almost no overhead: just click the folder and type in the recipient's email address. This is almost impossible to do with NFS, and scales very badly on NFS if N users at different sites are sharing files with M recipients at different sites. Certainly the cloud takes some inspiration from what came before but it's wrong to say that the cloud adds nothing new.
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mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 9:13 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
> If you compare NFS or AFS with Dropbox then you'll notice that Dropbox offers a big jump in functionality compared with the previous solutions.
different functionality yes, more functionality no.
with 'old' solutions, you can run your application directly from the network, you can't do that with dropbox.
there's also the issue of simultaneous access.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 10:43 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] with 'old' solutions, you can run your application directly from the network, you can't do that with dropbox. You can, if you really wish. there's also the issue of simultaneous access. Well, this is price you need to pay if you want to work with WAN. CODA also had this problem and in the end was even worse: you kind-of had the ability to use any programs with it, but in reality if was recipe for disaster. IOW: "lost functionality" is not lost because people had no way to implement it, it just interfered with "hassle-free" principle of the cloud and this is why it was removed.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 20:16 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
and this is why I disagree that the cloud provides more functionality.
I would agree that it provides different functionality.
but "more functional" implies that you can still do the same things as you could do with the "less functional" system. If neither system can really do what the other system does, one isn't more or less functional than the other, they just have different functions. Under some conditions you will value one function over the other, and under other conditions the value of the functions will flip.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 11:02 UTC (Sat) by djao (subscriber, #4263) [Link]
Simultaneous access sucks hard on NFS or AFS. The old protocols definitely don't win here.
I don't know what you mean by running applications directly from the network. We're talking about storage protocols, no? Storage is not related to applications. Dropbox is not intended for remote hosting of applications and nobody uses it for that purpose. There are different products such as EC2 for remote execution of applications; they would be the proper basis for comparison. If you mean that NFS supports things such as root filesystem over NFS, this is a comparatively easy problem to solve. For example put your filesystem image in the cloud and point your hypervisor to it (there are other ways too). Besides, the market demand for this feature is tiny compared with the market for personal storage.
Sorry for having to guess what you mean, but you really should be clearer about what you mean. To me there's no question that cloud storage solves a lot of really hard, previously unsolved problems that normal people find useful to have solved. In the end, if the old stuff does A, and the new stuff does B, and B is much more useful than A, then that's a big improvement, and one should not trivialize this accomplishment as merely "different functionality".
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 20:19 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
B is only "much more useful than A" if you don't need to do A and do need to do B
I'm not saying that B isn't useful, but to say that it's better than A requires that it can replace A.
Dropbox and equivalent have their place, but they are not a replacement for NFS/CIFS/AFS or other network filesystems.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 20:37 UTC (Sat) by djao (subscriber, #4263) [Link]
The number of people who need to do B far exceeds the number of people who need to do A. It is therefore completely fair and accurate to say that, in aggregate, population-wide, B is much more useful than A.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 20:41 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
that depends on the value of using A vs B
if A is used in the datacenters that provide the B functionality to users, then B would not exist without A and that would make A far more useful.
there are far more cars on the roads than trucks, but to say that cars are more useful, and therefor we should eliminate trucks would very quickly result in no more cars on the road either.
that's why I say that they are different, not more or less useful
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 20:55 UTC (Sat) by djao (subscriber, #4263) [Link]
I'm just guessing here, but I'm quite sure that most cloud storage providers do not use NFS, CIFS etc. in any way whatsoever.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 21:25 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
IMO, NFS/CIFS and other 'old' network technologies are too naïve to be useful in the current world. They were all designed for LANs and simply don't work with WANs.
And we actually don't have good solutions for WANs right now. But it's clear that the good old idea of 'network transparency' is dead.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 21:35 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
I'm not saying that they do work for WANs, but they still work quite well for LANs.
you would not use something like dropbox for a LAN filesystem
and that's my point, the solution for WAN and LAN are just different, what will work well for one will not work well with the other.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 22:27 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Well, we actually use DropBox across LANs simply because it works. And it also works across WANs.
It's clearly not optimal, sure. But it works everywhere.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 23, 2012 23:48 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
but you don't use dropbox to replace NFS type network filesystems, you use dropbox to do different (probably archival type) things instead.
dropbox is not a replacement for NFS type things, it's a different beast that does different things.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 24, 2012 0:04 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
We actually DO use it somewhat like NFS. Our molecular biologists write code on their laptops in a folder which is synced with a folder on our large server.
Most of time they run things locally, but if they need a lot of computing power then they can log into the cluster server and run things there. And results will be synced back to their laptops. Yes, there's a small lag in replication, but it's just a few seconds usually.
I'd argue that this is a superior solution to using NFS.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 24, 2012 0:18 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
following your logic, git is a better filesystem that NFS or dropbox because it provides version control features.
but I don't think that any of the git developers would take you seriously if you started saying that git was a replacement for NFS.
you are using dropbox to archive data and to access that archive from multiple places.
that is vastly different from the network filesystem approach where the application and user treat the remote storage like it was local storage.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 24, 2012 0:27 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Yes, git would be great for these kind of tasks if it could do fast automatic replication. I've tried to move our scientists to git, but they resist. Indeed, DropBox works just fine for them - they don't need to do explicit commits, pushes and pulls. You just change a file and it's changed on the server.
Oh, and they're using rsnapshot for backups. So git's ability to store history is not really a selling point.
>that is vastly different from the network filesystem approach where the application and user treat the remote storage like it was local storage
So DropBox works great for a lot of people simply because it doesn't try to do everything.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jun 24, 2012 6:20 UTC (Sun) by spaetz (subscriber, #32870) [Link]
I've tried to get something like dropbox-via-git with a smallish python app:
https://gitorious.org/synkie
It's a console app, inspired by sparkleshare and dvcs-autosync. As it works for me, and was written by me, it might have many rough edges though.
Feedback and patches welcome.
mainframe -> minicomputer -> PC -> smartphone Posted Jul 1, 2012 2:55 UTC (Sun) by jnahmias (subscriber, #16282) [Link]
Sounds like you want git-annex: http://git-annex.branchable.com/design/assistant/
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