[Infrastructures] AFS in an infrastructure

[Steve Traugott]

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On Sat, Mar 19, 2005 at 04:05:35PM -0700, Kyle Moore wrote:
> Is Campbell's AFS book still relevant and current to bother with?

Yes -- OpenAFS has fixed a lot of the misfeatures, but otherwise the
book is correct and current enough; probably the biggest difference
since it was written is the tendency for people to use other Kerberos
implementations, and LDAP.  It's one of the most readable technical
books I've ever seen as well -- his writing is excellent.

> If AFS is so great, which it sounds to be, why is it not very popular?=20

Commercial AFS was a non-POSIX filesystem which had only one commercial
vendor, and it wasn't cheap; before IBM bought them Transarc wasn't in
great shape.  I for one was pretty skeptical of AFS in the early 90's,
even while we were successfully running a test cell.  After the
acquisition, IBM never really considered AFS strategic enough.  All of
this built up a lot of inertia against AFS.

IBM's decision to open-source AFS in 2000 changed things a lot, as well
as the $35k each of funding from USENIX, Intel, and Morgan Stanley in
2003; things have really just picked up in the last few years.  It's
still a non-POSIX filesystem with wierdnesses, but having a broader base
of support and user base has pushed it over the tipping point into
viability for a lot of people.

Steve=20
--=20
Stephen G. Traugott  (KG6HDQ)
UNIX/Linux Infrastructure Architect, TerraLuna LLC
stevegt@TerraLuna.Org=20
http://www.stevegt.com -- http://Infrastructures.Org

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