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Re: [LUG] Cloud Storage

 

On 07/04/14 08:55, Philip Hudson wrote:
> On 6 April 2014 17:14, Simon Waters <simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> For all its faults everyone I know who networks Linux/Unix boxes
>> seriously at the file system level uses NFS as the de-facto standard, or
>> more modern distributed or clustered file systems for high availability,
>> or clustering systems.
> 
> Simon and bad should be taken as authoritative on this over anything I
> might say. I last worked in an all-*n*x shop (all Solaris) a long time
> ago, and even then file server admin was not officially part of my
> job. While we had NFS home directory shares that were trouble-free
> because they were professionally admined, for all ad-hoc stuff I found
> NFS so stinkingly buggy and fragile and unreliable and slow and
> high-maintenance and undermaintained that I would always use anything
> else (including netatalk, the FLOSS AppleTalk Filing System server) in
> preference. So it may just be outworn prejudice talking when I
> recommend Samba over NFS; I've never been disappointed by Samba itself
> (ignoring its damnable web configurator) enough to bother
> re-investigating NFS.
> 
> And yes, I do squirm at recommending a Microsoft standard. I take
> comfort from the fact that the FLOSS Samba project sets the de facto
> standard, with MS itself now playing catch-up. Nice to see them lose
> in a straight fight with FLOSS.
> 

Well, to be fair to you, if you were using Solaris or even SunOS back in
the days then NFS would have been really, really nasty and probably
would have broken a lot, especially if we're talking far enough back to
be pre-NIS when it was still Yellow Pages (BT soon put paid to that name
here in the UK).

I did a lot of Sun/SGI work back then and NFS was flaky as hell, despite
the fact that Sun actually invented it in the first place. Once you
threw HP-UX, AIX and all the million other types of Unix into the mix
(and of course none of them used the standard NFS ports either, or
rather they each had their own standard) it was amazing any of those
£100k machines ever got any work done as they could barely talk to each
other.

So yes, your old reminiscences of NFS being absolutely terrible back
then are spot on. It only got bearable once NFS3 had been out for a good
while and trickled down ever so slowly to all the different suppliers.

For whatever reasons (I think it was actually part of one of their
*many* legal settlements, with an unusual dash of pragmatism) MS are now
fully cooperating with Jeremy and the Samba team which has led to the
excellent release 4, and which is rapidly catching up with the MS
reference implementation. Now if only the greedy b'tards would enter
into the same spirit of cooperation with Office formats we might finally
be starting to see a thawing of the old MS/Linux cold war. I'm not
holding my breath on that though, it's perhaps their single biggest
stick to hit people with (one would think a business wouldn't want to
bully their own customer base, but hey, that's the international
software industry^H racket^H for you...)

Regards

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