Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2016 17:11:16 -0500 From: Chris Watson <bsdunix44@gmail.com> To: Zaphod Beeblebrox <zbeeble@gmail.com> Cc: freebsd-fs <freebsd-fs@freebsd.org>, FreeBSD Hackers <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: The small installations network filesystem and users. Message-ID: <9BB7E8B3-EC0E-457E-B2B2-FB80B1CF02B0@gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <CACpH0MdJ0YjtB-H5h-7u%2BdC%2BbbjVhN-Y7ejM7u7W-SL01qC3aA@mail.gmail.com> References: <CACpH0MdJ0YjtB-H5h-7u%2BdC%2BbbjVhN-Y7ejM7u7W-SL01qC3aA@mail.gmail.com>
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I'm glad you brought this up. I wanted to but I've heard it before on the li= sts and realize that there is this disconnect between the developers doing t= he actual work to implement these things and the end users.=20 I have always been very grateful to all the developers who over the years, a= nd I've been a FreeBSD consumer since the late 90s? And attended my first us= enix/freenix conf in Monterrey in 2001?, have done some really hard work on m= any many things in FreeBSD. For zero pay. But the thing that has always both= ered me about a lot of it is, it's just to complex to use for most end users= . Not all. But people want to get work done. Sifting through .conf files, go= ogling howtos, spending more time configuring it than installing it has alwa= ys been an issue. Developers in general do not think like an end user. And t= his leads to non developers just going "screw it I'll just get it running on= Linux with my GUI installer." Which is why FreeNas is so popular. It's take= n a lot, not all, but a lot of the pain and time consuming nature of learnin= g all the ins and outs of a NAS appliance from the equation.=20 It's wonderful to have flexibility and lord knows there are plenty of option= s and flags for most software. ZFS took a lot of pain out of file systems an= d volume management. I remember in 2001 staring at an HPUX box trying to fig= ure out Its volume manager and truth be told I never did and wanted to stick= my head in a meat grinder. It would have been less painful. I don't know if= the problem is simply writing things that are simple and optionally complex= is hard? Or if the people doing the work just want it to work for them and d= on't really want to take even more time to sit down and actually consider th= e software and its management from a users/consumers viewpoint.=20 There was a photo from bsdcan this year of a "sysadmin spotting" shirt. If y= ou read the text on it you actually begin to see how systemic and difficult a= ctually using and configuring most software is. It's probably a good reason m= ost developers use macs. In addition to better HW support. I'm not sure what= the solution to this is. I think it would be great if beta testers and the d= evelopers had a closer connection and issues were handles in a timely manner= . But in a volunteer project I get why that is unreasonable. But I mean go t= hrough the bug database and you can see PRs that are years old. I don't know= . I just know I'm getting to old to spend all day beating my head against so= ftware to get it working. Honestly if I have to spend over an hour reading c= rap docs all over the net because your manpage make no sense or is vague, tr= ying to configure the software, your software sucks and I'm rm'ing it. I rec= ently went through this with opensmtpd. I went right back to postfix. And al= l over something as simple or should be as simple as mail aliases!=20 Chris Sent from my iPhone 5 > On Jun 20, 2016, at 4:05 PM, Zaphod Beeblebrox <zbeeble@gmail.com> wrote: >=20 > 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." >=20 > 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. >=20 > 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. >=20 > Back-in-the-day, (1995-ish) I worked for an outfit that released on some 3= 0 > 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... >=20 > But just networking 2 FreeBSD boxes' filesystems seems harder than that lo= t > back then. Add in a couple linux boxes and something from M$, and you're > into the territory where you just scp files around. >=20 > I get the fact that network authentication is hard. I get that this is th= e > problem. I've made 3 or 4 serious runs at LDAP ... but I haven't gotten i= t > working. Is it time we (FreeBSD) had a solution that at least worked? > Something ever-so-close-to turnkey? >=20 > 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. > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-fs@freebsd.org mailing list > https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-fs > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-fs-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"
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