Noel Yap wrote: > Does anyone have an _up-to-date_ site comparing AFS and NFS? > Searching has turned up lots of old ones.
You seem to be getting some rather flip responses so I will chime in with this: - AFS has a single namespace: the content of /afs is the same on all machines (or under whatever drive letter(s) you pick for Windows). - AFS is an internet filesystem -- you can access other AFS sites (under /afs like everything else) if they let you. Location of the foreign AFS servers via DNS is supported so this can all be made relatively transparent. - AFS uses Kerberos for security and is ACL-based. Being root on a machine doesn't automatically give you permission to do what you want to files under /afs. You have to have proper Kerberos tokens for any access. This is great if you have a software development environment where your users need to have root. - AFS storage is organized into volumes, attached to one or more mount points under the /afs tree. These volumes can be moved from server to server while they are in use. This is great when you have to take down a machine, or you run out of space on it. The users never notice. - AFS clients cache files. Further, the cache algorithm is designed to eliminate network traffic: clients do not ask the servers whether a file has changed, the servers are responsible for telling the clients. - AFS supports replication -- AFS volumes can have read-only replicas. For things like binaries that don't need to change that often, you can replicate the files to several servers after which a server failure is automatically worked around by the AFS client machine. - AFS comes with a backup system that is not hard to integrate into whatever you use for backups (we use Legato here). - AFS supports Windows. The ability to seamlessly share files between UNIX and Windows machines in a unified namespace is a huge feature as far as I am concerned. - AFS has decent support from the open-source community. If you have problems, there are people here who are willing to help. -- Joe Buehler _______________________________________________ OpenAFS-info mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/openafs-info
