[BBLISA] Chucking samba

[Grant Young]

I hate to say it but sometimes Microsoft has made a couple of good technical choices that have stuck.  The first was to incorporate TCP/IP natively when Novell Netware was still using IPX/SPX.  The second was making a fairly dead simple Kerberos implementation and incorporating a decent LDAP directory behind it instead of Hesiod.  OK, so they stole the soul of Kerberos and made it their own, but they made it work for folks with less than a BS in EECS from MIT or CMU.  That's what Active Directory is and almost everyone of note will play with it.

I attended a class in the implementation of AFS at LISA a few years ago.  I pretty much left after the first break.  I had experienced AFS at MIT and thought it might be a good secure filesystem to use in public facing network.  But basically, it takes too much rocket science to implement and support in a commercial environment.

You have to wonder that TransArc tried to make it commercial and managed to get IBM to buy them on the promise, but then IBM gave up on it when there was no market and threw it back into the open source world.  It failed commercially because it was too complex technically.

I'm sure that people will throw bricks at me but my job is to solve business problems not exercise a hobby.  AFS is a hobby.

On Apr 26, 2010, at 4:53 PM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:

>> From: bblisa-bounces at bblisa.org [mailto:bblisa-bounces at bblisa.org] On
>> Behalf Of Toby Burress
> 
> I think the reason people responded overwhelmingly saying "just use AD" is
> because of the reasoning that Toby used to reach the conclusion "I want to
> use AFS."  Reasoning aside, I think these are valid questions:
> 
> 
>> I [am new to AFS]
>> But I haven't been testing for
>> very long, and I was wondering if anyone has been here before me, and
>> knows what headaches I can expect.  How does AFS tend to fail, and how
>> often?  Has anyone ditched AFS [in favor of something else]?
>> What
>> drove you away?  Is everyone who has used AFS in production in the past
>> screaming "Nnnooo!" in slow motion?  It seems like an actively
>> developed
>> technology that nonetheless is rarely used, so I'm kind of working in
>> a vacuum of opinions.
> 
> I personally don't use AFS, but I find it interesting to listen when other
> people are talking about it.
> 
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