POHMELFS returns

Posted Feb 9, 2012 11:06 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
Parent article: POHMELFS returns

So, in place of the old POHMELFS, which had no use case other than 'just like NFS, only better, look, you can take an existing filesystem and distribute it across the network instantly!' (I'm not sure I can think of a more common use case), we have... this, which requires you to shift all your FS data onto new storage which cannot be accessed without pohmelfs.

Not an improvement, sorry.

I think I'll try out NFSv4 one of these days. Maybe it's got inotify support now. I'd really like something NFSish ('take an FS and make it distributed, you don't need a cluster or special fabrics or anything like that') but that is closer to POSIX and also preferably supports inotify so that modern KDE and GNOME versions have a chance of working properly if your home directory is exported over it.

POHMELFS returns

Posted Feb 9, 2012 12:09 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (2 responses)

That was also the flaw with the Andrew File System (AFS) I believe.

POHMELFS returns

Posted Feb 9, 2012 21:18 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah. AFS made NFS look like the soul of POSIX-compliance: no cross-directory hardlinks, close() with extra magic effects (IIRC), and its own very non-Unixlike permissions system. (Ironically it would look more Unixlike today than when it was originally written, because ACLs are fairly similar to the AFS permission model.)

POHMELFS returns

Posted Feb 10, 2012 4:14 UTC (Fri) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]

If POSIX compliance was the path to victory, we'd all be using AT&T's RFS now. (I tried to find a link, but apparently RFS doesn't even have a wikipedia entry... sigh.)

Personally, I think AFS was a great system that should have been more widely adopted. It didn't get open sourced until much later, though, and the usual VHS vs. Betamax thing happened.

POHMELFS returns

Posted Feb 9, 2012 13:24 UTC (Thu) by jackb (guest, #41909) [Link]

Some people have great experiences with NFSv4. My experience has been that it's easy to encounter obscure bugs.

About a month ago I went through a period in which running emerge on any client on a network in which /home and /usr/portage is hosted on an NFS server would randomly trigger lockd errors on all the other clients, requiring a hard reboot to resolve.

Then after a few weeks the problem went away. I'm not sure which update (kernel, nfs-utils, portage, or some other dependency) resolved the problem. I didn't change any configuration during this time. That basically describes my experience with NFS - it's good when it works but it's also prone to mysterious and inexplicable problems from time to time.

POHMELFS returns

Posted Mar 3, 2012 10:01 UTC (Sat) by TRS-80 (guest, #1804) [Link] (2 responses)

Have you looked at GlusterFS? It stores files on a regular filesystem, and then makes them network accessible, optionally clustering, striping and mirroring them.

POHMELFS returns

Posted Mar 5, 2012 23:46 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (1 responses)

I haven't looked at it, though I've heard of it. I'll give it a look: at first sight it looks really rather nice.

POHMELFS returns

Posted Apr 13, 2012 19:15 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

No good. glusterfs cannot support inotify, because it is based on FUSE, and FUSE doesn't support inotify. Currently, it seems, only in-kernel distributed filesystems can support inotify -- and, as far as I can see, none of them do.