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AFS, Zephyr, Kerberos, BatMail in emacs--all mind-expanding stuff to me way back when!

by sk5t 6y ago

Jtsummers 6y ago
I never really explored AFS sufficiently to understand why this was the case, but I was always surprised it (or a similar mechanism) was not available in corporate offices. "Clear everything off of SharePoint you don't need, we're running out of room." "The shared drive is full, we're going to purge everything not in one of the special directories. See the list." AFS, as used at my university in the 00s, nicely reduced this problem by greatly expanding the amount of storage capacity available. It also helped speed up access to data by moving it to the system you were working on (assuming it was also an AFS node and not your personal device, in which case it was exactly like accessing a remote disk). It also helped with the "SharePoint is down again because even though we're a multibillion dollar corporation we're too cheap to hire real IT staff and Bob the Build Engineer tasked with keeping it up is on vacation." Local copies of data remained accessible.
- Ologn 6y ago
  > I was always surprised [AFS] (or a similar mechanism) was not available in corporate offices. In some ways it was self-fulfilling - corporate offices didn't use it, so there wasn't a great ecosystem, so corporate offices did not use it. There were a handful of vendors, all with drawbacks. On a large network, AFS, or particular cells or filesystems could get into a weird state. It was not like Solaris NFS where most senior sysadmins understood the filesystem error states. You want to feel you are putting data into something safe, permanent and always accessible, and AFS never felt like that in corporate environments I was in.
  - hestefisk 6y ago
    Haven’t heard AFS mentioned in years. I was co-admin of a SunSITE back in the early 2000s and we used AFS for mirroring. Whilst it was quite neat, it was quite complex, especially due to the underlying intricacies of Kerberos. It would be great to have a more modern version of AFS with its distributed nature, central name spaces etc but with a truly open, horizontally scalable distributed file system.

AFS, Zephyr, Kerberos, BatMail in emacs--all mind-expanding stuff to me way back when!

by sk5t 6y ago

AFS, Zephyr, Kerberos, BatMail in emacs--all mind-expanding stuff to me way back when!

I never really explored AFS sufficiently to understand why this was the case, but I was always surprised it (or a similar mechanism) was not available in corporate offices. "Clear everything off of SharePoint you don't need, we're running out of room." "The shared drive is full, we're going to purge everything not in one of the special directories. See the list." AFS, as used at my university in the 00s, nicely reduced this problem by greatly expanding the amount of storage capacity available. It also helped speed up access to data by moving it to the system you were working on (assuming it was also an AFS node and not your personal device, in which case it was exactly like accessing a remote disk). It also helped with the "SharePoint is down again because even though we're a multibillion dollar corporation we're too cheap to hire real IT staff and Bob the Build Engineer tasked with keeping it up is on vacation." Local copies of data remained accessible.

Ologn 6y ago
> I was always surprised [AFS] (or a similar mechanism) was not available in corporate offices. In some ways it was self-fulfilling - corporate offices didn't use it, so there wasn't a great ecosystem, so corporate offices did not use it. There were a handful of vendors, all with drawbacks. On a large network, AFS, or particular cells or filesystems could get into a weird state. It was not like Solaris NFS where most senior sysadmins understood the filesystem error states. You want to feel you are putting data into something safe, permanent and always accessible, and AFS never felt like that in corporate environments I was in.
- hestefisk 6y ago
  Haven’t heard AFS mentioned in years. I was co-admin of a SunSITE back in the early 2000s and we used AFS for mirroring. Whilst it was quite neat, it was quite complex, especially due to the underlying intricacies of Kerberos. It would be great to have a more modern version of AFS with its distributed nature, central name spaces etc but with a truly open, horizontally scalable distributed file system.