The end for fedfs-utils

[Posted June 14, 2017 by corbet]

Chuck Lever has announced that the fedfs-utils project, which created utilities for the Federated Filesystem, will no longer be developed. The most interesting part, for many, may be this discussion of why this project ground to a halt. (Thanks to Neil Brown).

home fileservers?

Posted Jun 15, 2017 5:09 UTC (Thu) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (6 responses)

I of course think what would help most would be a wider base of potential users. At the moment most residential ISPs have onerous anti-server language in their Terms. If everyone had the expectation that every internet connection provided a legal conduit to connect their home and mobile fileservers to, I think the increased demand would drive projects like this. But if fileserver operators are restricted to those with permission to operate servers instead of everyone connected to the internet, you have an entirely different kind of market driving development of this kind of software.

$0.02...

home fileservers?

Posted Jun 15, 2017 15:32 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (4 responses)

I don't think that would make much of a difference.

Most of the time ISP clauses like that are easy to ignore and are unenforced. They exist because it gives ISPs clout to go after people who are huge bandwidth hogs, since bandwidth is (or at least was for cable networks) shared among multiple users and the business model of residential ISP depended on most users only using the network for consumer-level stuff to keep the prices competitive. There is going to be port blocking in some cases, but even then it's usually to help to limit stupid things like spam.

Regardless of ISPs the popularity of NAT firewalls pretty much killed off any possibility of having easy to run and easy to discover internet services for most people. For example it's pretty much killed off any possibility of having easy to use self-hosted VoIP solutions like Jabber protocol's Jingle. And that is a much more mainstream thing then a federate file system is, which is really only going to be appealing to alpha geek-types.

home fileservers?

Posted Jun 16, 2017 15:39 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

> They exist because it gives ISPs clout to go after people who are huge bandwidth hogs, since bandwidth is (or at least was for cable networks) shared among multiple users and the business model of residential ISP depended on most users only using the network for consumer-level stuff to keep the prices competitive.

For which there's an easy solution, that they should have enforced. Basic QoS which selectively drops packets or otherwise throttles heavy users.

I don't see why they can't put a simple paragraph in their terms and conditions that says "bandwidth is shared. Light users will be prioritised. Light users means under X GB per month" etc etc.

Cheers,
Wol

home fileservers?

Posted Jun 16, 2017 19:00 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't know for certain, of course, but speculating..

Comcast (and I am sure other ISPs) has been exploring things like bandwidth limits and throttling for some time now. Problem is that it tends to piss off people. Where people have a choice between ISPs they can't really implement these types of restrictions due to market competition.

Limits on running servers tends to only affect people that, like us, really are interested in running our own servers. It's not really a mainstream issue, unlike throttling. (Note that I've been running personal servers on my home line for years against ISP policies and they don't really care.) For people that are interested in going on beyond 'personal usage' there is always 'business accounts', which is usually easy to get. With those you get other perks like the ability to order multiple IPv4 addresses and eliminates limits.

I am hoping with the increasing popularity of IPv6 we can move past this NAT-hell we currently exist in and people can start using more protocols for wide variety of services other then trying to run everything under the sun over HTTPS.

home fileservers?

Posted Jun 16, 2017 19:13 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> For people that are interested in going on beyond 'personal usage' there is always 'business accounts', which is usually easy to get.

While business accounts may be fairly easy to get in most locations, they tend to carry a hefty price premium over the residential accounts. In my experience, at an equivalent performance tier, you'll pay 1.5-2x [*] the price for the privilege of being allowed to run services on standard ports.

[*] I have this service at two different locations, with different ISPs -- The first charges 50% more for unblocked service with a dynamic IP. But to get a static IP, you're forced to rent their modem too, bumping it to just shy of double the price of residential service. The second one requires their modem regardless, and it's about 75% more for "business" service with the static IP bringing it up to, again, just shy of double their residential service.

home fileservers?

Posted Jun 16, 2017 20:49 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Comcast (and I am sure other ISPs) has been exploring things like bandwidth limits and throttling for some time now. Problem is that it tends to piss off people. Where people have a choice between ISPs they can't really implement these types of restrictions due to market competition.

It's called cherry-picking. If you are going to piss off users, why not selectively piss off the users who are the expensive users you don't really want?

If the average home user uses 40GB (what seems to be the current figure) and the ISP caps at, say, 80GB, then they can provision for 80GB (or maybe less, say 60GB). They then can undercut the competition. The pitch basically is "if you're a normal user you won't notice", and as I say they don't need to provision so much so they don't need to charge so much. "Don't pay to subsidise the bandwidth hogs."

Cheers,
Wol

home fileservers?

Posted Jun 16, 2017 7:55 UTC (Fri) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link]

NFS, with or without FedFS, is not really the technology you want for for accessing files across administrative domains over slow high-latency links, and where servers might occasionally be offline (either due to being shut down or due to a network glitch).

As mentioned in the linked email, the demise of fedfs seems mostly due to it being complex, and inside the datacenter the usecases for it are adequately covered by using the automounter and perhaps also pNFS.