[SGVLUG] Distributed filesystems

[Chris Smith]

On 6/22/05, Terry Hancock <hancock at anansispaceworks.com> wrote:
> For some time, I've used an NFS mount on my home network to
> store common files I'd like to share between our computers.
> 
> This was sort of okay when they were mostly images and text
> of some kind, but lately, I've wanted to save things like
> music files. Needless to say, playing MP3s in XMMS via an
> NFS mount is an uninspiring experience.  :-/

That actually works 100% fine with me, even over wireless. Sounds like
there is some kind of a configuration or bottleneck issue that is
incorrectly being assigned to NFS. NFS isn't that great, but it more
than capable enough to handle this stuff (and arguably it's actually
better suited to streaming MP3's than a lot of other cases). I'd
wonder about things like name resolution, PAM and /etc/nsswitch.conf.
 
> I was wondering if other people in SGVLUG had anything to
> say about these options. Have you tried any of them? How
> well did it work?  Are there others I ought to be
> considering?  How would you do it? Etc.

The rational alternatives to NFS I'd consider would be AFS, NFSv4 and
CIFS. Of those, there is no rational reason to think CIFS would be any
better than NFSv3 over TCP. NFSv4 is in many ways Sun realising that
AFS did have some advantages. I'd favor AFS primarily because it's
more established/stable than NFSv4. You could use GFS or Lustre, but
those are really designed for clusters and while they will work, they
are probably overkill for your needs.

-- 
Chris