Daniel:

People have been using AFS and NFS with Windows for over a decade
without the byte-range locking.   There are things you simply should
not do with it.

There are many sites that for years have stored the users Windows
profiles in AFS and take advantage of redirected folders.  People
are certainly using AFS from Windows with read/write folders.  I
certainly do.

Would AFS be appropriate for a shared project directory from which
multiple users edit Microsoft Office documents at the same time?
At the current time the answer is 'no'.

The other items are of higher priority because they affect extremely
large organizations that are current users of AFS and have been for
a very long time.   While I understand that this issue is a critical
issue for you, it is not for hundreds of thousands of users that
already have AFS deployed and might be forced to migrate to another
distributed file system that currently does not exist simply because

(a) there is no appearance of a "stable" product

(b) recent regulations have imposed new auditing and security requirements

(c) the use of AFS on Windows is for all practical purposes restricted
to ASCII while their users come from hundreds of countries around the globe.

Your request is on the list.   If you look at all that has been
accomplished over the last eighteen months you will see that we have
come a long way.   I wonder if you would have even considered AFS at
all on Windows at the end of 2003.

Jeffrey Altman


Daniel Wood wrote:

> Thanks for the info,
> 
> Just wondering, would it not require any changes to the server's locking
> mechanisms as well as the client to accomplish this?
> 
> Also, I'm surprised that it is not a higher priority since it seems a rather
> critical problem to us.  If this is not implemented then the other features
> are not usable at all due to the risk of data loss, whereas the converse is
> not true.  Do you know of many networks with Windows clients using OpenAFS
> that are working with read-write shares without problem?  Just curious as to
> whether most networks are using the read-only replication features, with rw
> volumes only for user directories or something like that (which is something
> we can't do unfortunately!).
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Dan

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