[BBLISA] Chucking samba

[Dean Anderson]

On Mon, 26 Apr 2010, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:

> > From: bblisa-bounces at bblisa.org [mailto:bblisa-bounces at bblisa.org] On
> > Behalf Of Dean Anderson
> > 
> > I've used AFS since the 1980s.  The OpenAFS Windows client is very
> > stable, and uses a loopback adapter, which insulates the AFS client
> 
> The mere fact that you have to say "yes it's stable" makes me less
> confident.  ;-)

It seemed to me that certain other folks were maligning its maturity.

> Although I know this is unrelated, I do have one parallel experience, which

Yeah. MS has done things like that. MS mysteriously would overwrite the
boot records on non-MS filesystems. Stuff like that. If they can break
it, they probably will someday. Of course, patches quickly become
available when they do those things.

> > the NetApp feature of copy-on-write versioning is inspired by the
> > AFS backup snapshot
> 
> Please tell that to Netapp, so they'll drop the copy-on-write lawsuit
> against sun/oracle.

Good call. It is indeed unpatentable prior art which might invalidate
the NetApp patent. I'm sure Sun knows about AFS, but maybe someone
should point this out; one never knows.

> > AFS is in the class of being widely deployed, but not a dominant
> > system. Yet.
> 
> "Yet."  Hehehehe You mean since the 1980's when you started using it,
> it simply needs more time to become dominant?  ;-)

Well, for a long time AFS wasn't free, and it wasn't cheap either.  Its
only recently become free (GPL), and even more recently been ported to
systems like Windows and Linux. (Thanks again, IBM!)  The user base
grows, and since Linux NFS continues to suck, and NFS continues to get
AFS-like features, I think AFS will continue to grow.

The only real competitor with AFS is DCE, which is also now free GPL.  
For many years DCE was free only for non-commercial use. But DCE is
years behind AFS now in porting to modern BSD, Linux, Solaris, Windows.  
DCE's only advantages are:  a technically superior RPC system, an X.500
server for naming, Kerberos 5 with RSA authentication extensions, DFS
with full locking, and wire compatibility with MS AD.  A downside (from
the Open Source Community POV) is wire compatibility with MS AD. 

		--Dean

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