> What is AFS waiting for, really???
I think the question is rather "What has AFS been waiting for?"
The answer is most likely that for about 8 years AFS has been waiting
for DFS to take off. Many people considered AFS too complicated to set
up, not well documented (how do I learn how to properly hack source
code to do AFS authentication, anyway), proprietary, not
POSIX-compliant, too expensive, and not available for Windows 3.xx or
Windows 9x (not even for OS/2, by the way). DCE/DFS claimed that it
would solve all those problems - except the first one. Exactly this
one, however, was the show stopper at a time when HTTP revolutionized
the world and was easier to set up than anything else ever. Who'd care
about things like security during a revolution? So AFS didn't take off
because its own developers believed in DFS, DFS didn't take off because
it happened to be the age of HTTP, and now we are once again left with
Microsoft reinventing a concept that SUN developed in the Stone Age.
The fact that nobody from Transarc even bothered to comment on this
thread confirms that there is no hope whatsoever.
--
Michael Niksch /Zurich/IBM @ Zurich @ IBM_Internal
IBM Zurich Research Laboratory [EMAIL PROTECTED] (NIK at ZURICH)
Saeumerstrasse 4 http://www.zurich.ibm.com/~nik/
CH-8803 Rueschlikon / Switzerland P: +41-1-724-8913 F: +41-1-724-8959
