Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2016 17:05:30 -0400 From: Zaphod Beeblebrox <zbeeble@gmail.com> To: freebsd-fs <freebsd-fs@freebsd.org>, FreeBSD Hackers <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org> Subject: The small installations network filesystem and users. Message-ID: <CACpH0MdJ0YjtB-H5h-7u%2BdC%2BbbjVhN-Y7ejM7u7W-SL01qC3aA@mail.gmail.com>
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but amidst discussions of pNFS (among other things) I thought I should bring up something someone said to me: and that is (to quote him) "using NFS is too hard, I always fail." I can empathize (although I know better) with this statement. I've been using NFS since v2 was a "new thing." Rick Maclem was the sysadmin at my University. So here's the thing. SMB is easier to implement than NFSv4. NFSv3 is easier to implement than v4. In general, even though I know what is required, I implement SMB or v3 rather than v4... which means I'm better off than my friend: he just does without network filesystems. Back-in-the-day, (1995-ish) I worked for an outfit that released on some 30 odd platforms including VMS. We had /d/<machine>/<disk> mounted on every machine. Besides the fact that power outages were a bit of a nightmare (many machines didn't recover well if their NFS imports were not yet ready), This worked well and you could access your home directory on any machine from any other machine. The company never really had the money to have a proper home directory server ... and generally that ended up being your own workstation... and we worked on satellite imagery ... so disks were always full... and the backbone was 10Base2... But just networking 2 FreeBSD boxes' filesystems seems harder than that lot back then. Add in a couple linux boxes and something from M$, and you're into the territory where you just scp files around. I get the fact that network authentication is hard. I get that this is the problem. I've made 3 or 4 serious runs at LDAP ... but I haven't gotten it working. Is it time we (FreeBSD) had a solution that at least worked? Something ever-so-close-to turnkey? I've we're looking at the other more complex adoptions (like pNFS and ZFS and whatnot) ... it would seem that we should ship something that has a chance of working.
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