Talk about talks

[Anthony de Boer]

Christopher Browne wrote:
> A couple of ideas for talks came up last night...
> 
> There was quite a bit of interest in distributed filesystems.
> 
> There seem to be two directions this could go, both legitimate:
> 
> i) Clustered filesystems, like GFS / OCFS2
> 
> Much as with clustering as a general topic, questions that emerge include:
> - So what?
> - Why would I want this in the first place?  Isn't NFS fine?
> - What would cause me to prefer GFS over OCFS2 or vice-versa?
> - What other options are there?
> - What would cause me to head back to local filesystems or NFS?
> 
> ii) Distributed filesystems
> - Why would I want this in the first place?  Isn't NFS fine?
> - Why would I prefer 9p?  Or AFS?  Or InterMezzo?
> - What aspects of these will make me prefer to poke burning needles in
> my eyes, and run back, crying, to NFS?
> - What about NFSv4?

Okay, that's five times you mention NFS there.

NFS has its place.  It can be a useful protocol, either within a group
or cluster of machines, or as the product you're trying to export to
eg. workstation users.

I've done solutions that involved boxes receiving email and parking it
in user maildirs in shared storage, so that another box could allow the
user to access it (POP, IMAP, etc) and later delete it.  NFS works
nicely if a bunch of boxes want to read and write the same filesystem,
especially so if you can dodge locking issues.

However, if you're depending on it from the client level above it, you
want sufficiently reliable NFS servers, and high-availability
clustering techniques like Madison and the rest of us discussed last
night may well be what provides that.

(I should also note in passing that I've also done high-availability mail
with two boxes doing very frequent Unison runs to keep their maildir
trees and user configs in sync.)

Anyway, further discussion of clustered and/or distributed filesystems
would be a topic of interest to me.  I'm not sure if I'll be able to
make TLUG meetings in the fall, though.

-- 
Anthony de Boer
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