Re: [Gnu-arch-users] a global-scale txnal distributed filesystem

[Andrew Suffield]

On Wed, Jun 16, 2004 at 09:52:17AM -0700, Tom Lord wrote:
> 
>     > From: Andrew Suffield <address@hidden>
> 
>     > > There's a gazillion little details and elaborations on the general
>     > > idea sketched above but I haven't been able to think of any that
>     > > aren't trivial.
> 
>     > Authentication and authorisation. With NFS, the answer is basically
>     > "don't"; it not only fails to even attempt to solve the problem, but
>     > makes it several times harder. You could only really use this in
>     > trusted environments.
> 
>     > NFSv4 would be viable for this, but NFSv4 itself is not yet viable,
>     > and has little in common with earlier NFS versions - it's a
>     > not-completely-stupid network filesystem, which means it's nowhere
>     > near as simple.
> 
> The only reason to pick NFS is for convenience of implementation.  I
> don't know of any other portable way to write a user-space filesystem.
> 
> Any other way to do a created-on-demand filesystem with the ability
> to remap paths name would work as well.

Hmm... I don't believe there is any easy portable way to do it on a
multi-user system... but CFS demonstrates a hard way to do it (using
NFS as a base). So I guess that can work, if it's just for the local
system.

[The problems are those surrounding the issue of authentication
credentials (for remote access methods) and archive registration, with
a given that the user may not have control over filesystem behaviour,
so the daemon must be running as a system user; the CFS model for this
is clumsy but workable.]

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
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