Excerpts from internet.info-afs: 8-Jul-94 Re: e-mail out of AFS ! [EMAIL PROTECTED] (1496) > But it seems to me that AMS has left such a bad taste in CMU's > collective mouth that they've gone overboard in the other direction. It is important to note that we believe the success of AMS to have been the reason for our problems. It is a great mail system which makes very good use of its underlying infrustructure. Even in comparison to most other mail systems today (5 years later), AMS has aged very well and blows most of them out of the water. The problem is that ist succeded and exposed some of that infrustructure's major limitations. Excerpts from internet.info-afs: 8-Jul-94 Re: e-mail out of AFS ! [EMAIL PROTECTED] (1496) > Yes, this approach depends on having the file system on every client I > use. But to me, without the file system, I don't have a computer, I > just have a fancy terminal. I don't find it at all interesting to read > my mail from a machine on which I have no access to my files. I'd > rather telnet or X-display to a real computer and use that instead. Yes, but you have to solve this problem in a large diverse environment. Saying that you would rather use an X Terminal doesn't mean providing X Application servers for 12000 users just for mail is warrented. We estimate that we have over 55 machines dedicated to mail. 23 of those machines are doing translation and can only handle 500 simulteneous users from Macs and PCs. We aren't building a mail system for people like you, it is for the Macintosh and PC desktop users who make up the clear majority. In our environment they do not have filesystem space right now because we determined the cost of providing translators would be too high. Later on they will have space in Netware using their AFS passwords. We still consider AFS to be a very good distributed medium for software and user files to Unix machines. In fact we consider it the only alternative for those functions. We are building new services which depend heavily upon AFS for those functions. They will later depend on DFS for the same thing. We are simply no longer producing core services such as mail and printing which use AFS as an intermediary for actual service provision.
