Hi.
I am setting up a remote office set-up for a client. The people in
question shut down their main office here in Dallas, and were told by
their boss to work from their homes. They run a variety of applications
and needed an effective way to share files/applications/etc btw them.
ADSL connections were gotten for all of the workers in the office. All
links are 1.5 megabits per second downlink, and 128kilobits per second
uplink.
The first solutions I tried were SAMBA over VPN style links (I tried an
IPSEC stack and Microsofts PPTP implimentation.) These posed a severe
latency problem because ALL I/O was synchronously done to and from the
server, certain applications appeared frozen because the applications
were waiting on the I/O to complete! The clients and I agreed that this
was an unacceptable solution.
So work progressed to find an effective solution that provided the
responsiveness they needed with the unified filesystem they also required.
At first, I remembered that AFS could solve the problem. However, I
still can not find a windows 95 AFS client. I had a friend at Stanford
who told me they had a Win95/98 client but the link to the software is
very recently defunct.
That's when I remembered CODA.
Coda's features fit perfectly with what was needed, so I installed it
and got it running. (btw, I notice that there are a lot of
'coda-and-CMU-specific-jargon' that I am not firmiliar with, but I am
able to understand it enough to have it running properly.)
A couple of questions,
1. What parameters should I set for rpc2 and sftp for suitable packet
queue sizes and timeout values for an ADSL connection like the one I
described above?
2. I noticed that I can share a coda filestorage via samba and get to
the shares this way. (I have set up a small samba fileserver at each
remote location which uses the linux coda client to connect to the SCM
and server cluster over at our establishment where the data is being
housed.) ... Is there a way to do an automatic login with clog ?? (i.e.
force-feeding clog the password somehow?)
3. Is the windows 9x client being maintained at all? I tried it and it
seemed extremely unstable (of course, that was in your disclaimer so I
am not pointing fingers. hehehe.)
4. If coda won't work, is there a win9x AFS client I can find?? I'm
desparate!
Regardless of what happens with this client.. The stability and
flexibility that coda has shown on the UNIX side has shown me that I can
use it here at our establishment for our file storage needs.. An
excellent system! Great work guys, Coda kicks ass!
Thanks,
Thom Cherryhomes - CTO / OPENMINDS Inc. (Customer Liberation Through
Free Software Solutions)
