Converting a MS company to Linux

[John Olson]

I used the AFS space at ASU for 4 or 5 years and accessed it from Unix,
PCs and Macs and had no surprises.  The only caveat is that data can be
lost when you have multiple writers on the same (cached) file.

-----Original Message-----
From: plug-discuss-admin@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
[mailto:plug-discuss-admin@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On Behalf Of Ted
Gould
Sent: Wednesday, October 02, 2002 6:49 PM
To: PLUG Discuss List
Subject: RE: Converting a MS company to Linux



> If anyone knows of a good way to support 700 Linux desktops I would be

> more than open to suggest ins.

If you want true fail over capacity NFS is not your solution (maybe in
v4, but I haven't looked at that).  The answers your looking for will
come from AFS and CODA.  Basically the story goes that AFS was developed
at Carnegie Mellon, and then went proprietary.  (It stands for the
Andrew File System, Andrew Carnegie, get it :)  As part of IBM's Open
Source moves they have released their propriety version of AFS.  This is
kinda the the industry standard to do what you are doing - I've seen it
run well more than 700 unix machines (on a variety of platforms).

Well, there were guys at CMU who weren't exactly happy with AFS, and
wanted to make it better, so you have CODA.  This is already built into
the Linux kernel, and works pretty well.  I'll say that it's a bitch to
set up, but it's definitely doable.  What CODA gives you is disconnected
access.  Which basically means you can have it on a laptop, disconnect
the laptop from the network, and still used the cached data like you are
connected to the network.  Way cool, but if you don't have laptops isn't
very useful, but wait, it is.  Why?  Because it means that your network
isn't a single point of failure either.  So if your switch fails most
people can continue to work on what they were doing while you replace
that switch.

Both of these use their own authentication systems, can be a downside
for enterprise environments, but I believe they both support windows and
use Kerberos so it isn't a really big deal.

I would have to say that I haven't run a network on either, but I've
definitely used a couple of AFS networks heavily, they run nice.

		Good luck,
			Ted