My project wish-list for the next 12 months

[Adam Maloney]

On Thu, 2 Dec 2004, Brad Knowles wrote:
>
> 	It's interesting that you mention this.  I've been giving some 
> thought to how I might be able to dive in and start seriously working on 
> building my UltraSPARC cluster (based on the four U10 clones I have already, 
> plus as many U5s as I can throw into the mix), and I was hoping to find a 
> better solution than NFS, and AFS/Coda/OpenAFS was tops of my list of 
> alternatives to consider.
>

I would be very excited to see OpenAFS become production ready on BSD.  I 
was playing with CODA a few weeks ago in a test environment.  I could get 
it to mostly work the way I wanted, but it appears that there are some 
limitations that I don't like.  For one, having to "login" to CODA using 
clog (or maybe I misunderstood the docs on this point?)  I want to be able 
to list a clustered filesystem in fstab and be usable like any other 
UFS or NFS filesystem - no logging in, permissions and ownership work, 
etc.

Better yet, an approach like Google's File System.  If I run out of space 
or speed, let me throw more boxes at it.  Without losing the filesystem. 
The machine comes onto the network, notifies one of the chunk servers that 
it's available and how much disk it's got.  The chunk servers can now send 
chunks of data to it.  Data is automatically replicated to multiple disk 
servers, and requests are shared across those servers that have copies of 
the same data.  Chunk servers share metadata so they aren't a single point 
of failure.