Alternatives to NFS?

On Thursday 04 September 2003 21:13, dsaxena@plexity.net wrote:
> As the subject suggests, I am looking for an alternative
> to NFS for using as a network FS. My main use of NFS at
> the moment is to mount /home and /var/spool/mail from my
> server. Everything is great until I start doing something
> that does massive FS I/O and I start getting "NFS server
> not respoding\nNFS server OK\n" errors.

What is your server's hardware configuration? I'm running a Celeron 450
(actually, a 300A overclocked to 100mhz FSB) on my server, with 256mb of
memory, and no matter how massive my FS I/O, I don't get those problems, even
back when I was running Linux on my server instead of FreeBSD.

> Anyone played
> around with CODA, Intermezzo, or even NFS over TCP and
> have any experiences regarding the reliability and stability
> under heavy loads.

I've played with CODA and Intermezzo. They aren't ready for primetime. AFS
(Andrew File System) is ready for primetime, and more secure than NFS, but in
my testing was quite slow. The primary advantage of AFS is its ability to
create a single filesystem image of multiple AFS servers, so that you can add
storage without having to run an automounter or modify every client machine's
/etc/fstab to mount an additional server. OpenAFS is free and downloadable
from IBM. It does require that you set up Kerberos, which is what it uses to
authenticate filesystem requests to prevent you from accessing files that you
don't have permission to access (the problem with NFS is that if you're user
'eric' on workstation a, and there's a user 'eric' on workstation b where the
person on workstation b has root access to his workstation, the guy on
workstation b can access your files on the NFS server that both of you
share). The whole setup of Kerberos+AFS is rather a b****, but I finally did
manage to do it on my test network.

> Any other networks FS'es that I haven't
> mentioned?

Well, you have the Windows and Novell filesystems, but since they are not
native Unix filesystems, you're likely to lose some Unix semantics when you
use them.

-- 
Eric Lee Green              eric@badtux.org
Linux/Unix/Storage Engineer Seeks Job -
  see http://badtux.org for resume