Re: [9fans] Distributed filesystems: Plan 9 vs. Linux

["John E. Barham" <jbarham@jbarham.com>]

> It's not that you can't do it in Lunix -- look at Globus' Replica
> Location Service or MDS (Metasomething Discovery Service, they keep
> changing the name) for just a few of the options for handling
> replication, there are others specifically tailored to clusters too.

Look interesting.  It would be nice to avoid reinventing another wheel...

> They are all crufty, don't play well with each other, require their
> own clients and a pain in the proverbial to administer, but that's a
> consequence of the multiple layers of abstraction they're built
> upon to avoid admitting that UNIX simply lacks a decent
> mechanism for importing remote resources.

Yeah, the major disadvantage vis a vis Plan 9 is that they still requirement
integration w/ our client software.

> Binding remote exports in a union directory is so trivial in Plan 9
> that it's really a non-issue (you'll spend much more time tracking
> which files are stored where, especially if they move).  The show
> stoppers are the clients -- what will you be using on the client side?

Our clients operating systems are OS X, Windows and Linux.  Client-side
languages are C/C++ and Python.

> Will you require users to be running Plan 9 to access the service, or
> are you prepared to spend some time developing a way to bring it to
> their environment (by, say, implementing a 9p client suitable for the
> task, something like v9fs)...

At this point nobody is running Plan 9, and there are too many dependencies
client-side to consider P9 there.  But running P9 on the file servers and
headless image processing nodes (Mac G5s, BTW) might be worth considering at
some point.

    John