Excerpts from mail: 15-Feb-94 Re: AFS on None Unix Platfo.. Mark
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (613)
> I am really glad you asked this. I'm willing to bet there are many people
> wondering if IBM's announcement of Windows DCE support will include DFS.
DFS under Windows? That would be like a monkey hitching a ride on a big
elephant's back -- it'll never happen.
What DCE core services might offer DOS platforms, however, is a
mechanism by which to present DCE authentication credentials to
DFS-capable PC NOS file servers.
A much more likely scenario, than the one described above, is that IBM
will announce a LAN server of some sort that speaks DFS and that
services TCP/IP-based file access requests from authenticated DOS
Windows clients.
Windows NT, on the other hand, might very well be capable of supporting
a DFS implementation natively, as part of its desktop operating system.
(The NTFS and DFS episode local file system architectures are remarkably
similar.) But are PC users likely to switch en masse from a cheap,
simple, useful, single-tasking personal computing platform to a
relatively expensive, complicated workstation-class machine, just to
have network connectivity? -- probably not the short term anyway, and
especially not if an intermediate server can accomplish the same
functionality at a fraction of the cost, and in a manner that shields
administrative burdens from the end user.
I think we'll see PC-based DFS on both the desktop and on NOS servers
sometime in the future, but I personally believe that server-based
access will win over desktop DFS, in at least the startup phases.
-Bob
