Many thanks for the helpful responses I've gotten so far.  I have some 
more questions.

  1.  Widely-distributed clients.

  I've been giving some thought to the access I'd like to provide for my 
customers.  One possibility is to put a workstation in the user's site to 
act as an AFS client for them.  These users would be separated widely 
across the Internet, but should all have reasonable connectivity (in 
general, T1 speeds).

  AFS uses Rx over UDP, but also does end-to-end consistency checking to 
ensure data integrity.  

  What kind of performance can I expect for users with a moderate amount 
of activity on the remote server?  The AFS fileservers would live on 
relatively high-end workstations, on FDDI just off of a T3 connection 
(probably two hops away).  Assuming the user's network connectivity is 
robust, would the preceived performance be "acceptable"?

  2.  Byte-level record locking and Oracle.

  Some of our users will want to use Oracle and similar applications.  I 
believe that Oracle relies on/uses byte-level record locking, which is 
not supported by AFS.  Does anyone have any experience with Oracle and 
AFS?  

  In general, what applications do not work with AFS?

  3.  Current perceptions of AFS.

  AFS has been around for several years now, and I haven't seen much in 
the way of DCE/DFS implementations (nor do I have much direct knowledge 
of it).  Although at UMich we've seen pehaps some of the scaling limits 
of AFS, I think for my particular application scaling should not be a 
problem.

  What is the current perception of AFS?  Is it an "old" technology?  Are 
there other options, besides DCE or Sun's new version of NFS, that 
provide a similar set of features?

  Thanks in advance for responses.

  -brian

--
Brian W. Spolarich - ANS CO+RE Systems - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - (313)677-7311
  Want strong encryption?  Use ROT26.  Its _twice_ as strong as ROT13.


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