On 11/28/12 12:40:24, Phillip Moore wrote: > On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 12:16 PM, Steven Jenkins > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I think there are a few people out there who would at least play with > > EFS if it were easy to set up. But no one has approached me > > personally in at least a year. > > And THAT is precisely the problem -- EFS will *never* be easy to > setup, primarily because it makes far too many assumptions about what > "well managed infrastructure" means, assumptions that I have seen > virtually NONE of the large IT shops meet in a satisfactory way. EFS > will be easy to set up when setting up a new, scalable Enterprise > architecture is easy. IOW: probably never. > > For example, you can NOT share NFSv3 widely unless you have your > uid/gid house in order, and my current employer is the ONLY large shop > I have ever worked in that did this well. YOUR current employer (and > one of my previous ones) never did, and never will, and yet you are > still assuming this basic condition has been met. > > After 3 years of struggling to make EFS easy to setup, I've done about > all I can at this point. The level of automation that is available > is tremendous, and the only feedback I've ever received on the process > amounts to: "Gee, it's still kinda hard..." > > I am really convinced at this point, that as an open source product, > EFS is not going to acquire any new users, simply because it requires > well managed core infrastructure, and the few places that NEED the > scale that EFS supports either can't provide what EFS needs, or they > have already solved these problems to their satisfaction and aren't > interested in EFS. >
There is arguably a useful debate to be had over whether these concepts scale DOWN and, if so, how useful that would be for anybody. We know they scale up and we know that for large scale you need to large infrastructure and for the reasons you state above, this isn't readily available for most people. But, if these concepts are useful for 1 or two machines or a handful, then getting EFS to scale down and getting it easy to deploy could mean there's a path to getting more users. The problem of course is not necessarily getting EFS to scale down, but convincing people it's useful for their small environment. There are some users that are convinced of this, but they mostly work or worked at your current employer. Most users don't even know they have a problem with being able to support multiple versions and they certainly therefore don't know there's a solution. They use what comes out of the box from the major vendors. And then argue over which one has the best commandline interface or compiles faster, i.e. they argue over which color the bike is... --Kevin _______________________________________________ EFS-dev mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.openefs.org/mailman/listinfo/efs-dev
