[SGVLUG] Distributed filesystems

[Terry Hancock]

On Wednesday 22 June 2005 04:31 pm, Michael Proctor-Smith wrote:
> Unless you want disconneted operation I don't see how intermezzo is
> going to be more useful. Plus I think that coda in is a contstant state
> of its going to work write soon. 

More accurately, I *would* like a running backup. This would seem to
be one way to do it.  I have had disk drives go belly-up before now, so it
could happen again.

> If Speed is your problem, then you need to work on your configuration,
> or your network. I have gotten more the 10MB per second, from a NFS
> mount.

I'm having slow data access because I'm sucking the data through a
network and tying up two CPUs instead of one, and you're saying I
need to work on my network speed?  Come on, why am I using the
network for this at all?

I suspect it's slow because I'm using antiquated equipment, but so what?

NFS will *always* be slower than a local drive, no matter how I tweak
my network.  And if I tweak it so that MP3s work fine, then something
else like full-motion video is going to trash it.

In fact, I'm not even talking about a specific NFS setup, I'm talking about
my general experience with NFS.  And while you just might be right about
MP3 (after all, they are compressed), the problem is worse with WAV data
and other formats, since they are bulkier.

I can see this kind of reaction if I'd asked the question on an NFS help
list, but my question wasn't "I'm having trouble with NFS, how can I fix it?".

I don't doubt that I could *make* NFS do it if I were determined to use
NFS, but why should I be?

My point is that NFS's purpose does not seem to match well with my
goals anymore:  I no longer need to share drives because of the need to
conserve on storage space. The main motivation for it now is because
of the need to make certain data available to several machines on the
network. 

I was hoping for some constructive advice on alternatives.

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com