I'm not really sure what you all expected, or where this doom-and-gloom stuff
is coming from. AFS, and more recently, DFS, have been quite sucessful!
Consider that they're expensive, focused technologies. New AFS and DFS
environments are constantly being brought on line. It's pretty rare to see
places move away from either one.
If you thought that they should take over the fileservice slot on the
internet -- well, they have. I've never, ever heard of anyone using SMB over
the Internet to share files. Nor HFS (Mac). It's very rare to hear of
people using NFS to share files over the Internet. If you talk about sharing
files and the Internet in the same sentance, it's fairly likely that you're
either
a) talking about AFS or DFS
b) a Microsoft or Sun salesperson, pushing your "solution". :)
The question of "what place does file sharing have in the context of the
Internet, especially with the advent of the web?" is a valid one. I stand in
the camp that says it's a fundamental service and will be with us for a very
long time. Sure, web technologies have usurped some of the need -- but
they're a long way from *replacing* it. Filesystems are the bread and butter
of all (fairly normal) computer systems today. WWW is jam -- sweeter,
prettier, but not the whole answer...
Dfs is a joke. A serious one, certainly, but nevertheless they fell so far
below the mark that it's not real competition. We (the AFS/DFS crowd) should
take it as an honor that M$ needs to copy us. [Same name; many similar
jargon words - fileset, ...; similar description and target; ...]
NFS, no matter how big and fast servers get, just doesn't play in the same
space as AFS/DFS. Do any of you know of any companies/organizations that
routinely use NFS for around-the-country/world filesharing?
The comments/suggestions about how to make it bigger are good ones.. there
certainly are more areas where it would be a good fit. Lowering the price
barrier would make an enormous difference in market penetration and in growth
rate. Making clients ubiquitously available would probably instantly
increase server sales 10-fold [IBM? Are you listening? When are you going to
ship a client on your PC's?] Installation should be further simplified. (But
I think the complexity card is overplayed for both AFS and DFS.)
Sure, it's sad to see opportunities missed. But that doesn't mean that it's
failed!
[Ok, enough ranting for now ... ]
Jim Rowan Distributed Computing Specialists, Inc. DCE/DFS Consulting
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (512) 374-1143
