Jeffrey Hutzelman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Monday, March 06, 2006 09:17:23 AM -0600 "Christopher D. Clausen"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
It's kind of hard to explain, but Windows people and Unix people
think differently about what they are serving out. AFS grew up in
a world where Unix admins wanted to distribute executable
"applications" as well as data from a single name space tree. In
the enterprise, Unix workstations actually run their applications
off of the network.
Warning: I am a Windows person.
I'm not at an enterprise. I'm at a University.
So am I. A University _is_ an enterprise, and a challenging one at
that, because of the highly heterogeneous community. At Carnegie
Mellon, we use an enterprise-grade distributed filesystem (AFS), and
we use it in exactly the way Jeff described. Here's why:
UIUC's shared storage (if you can call it that) is 100MB of WebDAV space
per student: http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/netfiles/ As such, we don't use
an enterprise-grade filesystem :-(
Since this is essentially useless for home directories, almost every
department runs their own fileserver, possibly independent of the
central Active Directory domain, though usually not. Since there is
only a single a Windows or Mac OS fileserver, it makes sense to have
machines and the server joined to campus Active Directory to push the
password services to the central IT organization.
We don't just have a heterogeneous community, we have a heterogeneous IT
structure.
In such a model, it makes sense for pre-existing Windows file servers to
be hooked in to a central directory structure like AD and use a shared
tree for storage like MS Dfs. It is also very easy to purchase and
setup a single additional Windows server as a replica of the first one
for high-availability and a backup at some level.
That is all I am suggesting.
Back in the 1980's (long before I got to CMU), a few people had a
grand vision. They imagined a world in which every student and staff
member had his or her own small computer. All of these machines
would be similar hardware and run the same software, maintained and
distributed by a central support group, which would also manage the
machines so that individual users wouldn't have to know how.
I think this is where UIUC differs. The problem is that there isn't a
single entity managing all computers (as is the case at most schools.)
There is a centrally maintained Active Directory domain, with seperate
OUs delegated to various other autonomous groups:
http://www.ad.uiuc.edu/
<<CDC
--
Christopher D. Clausen
[EMAIL PROTECTED] SysAdmin
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