From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "John E. Barham" Subject: Re: [9fans] Distributed filesystems: Plan 9 vs. Linux To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Message-id: <043401c3ffb2$7ff48a20$6539a8c0@hpn5415> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT References: <029c01c3fefe$95f0a430$6539a8c0@hpn5415> <5eb036eb621fc8ca01d2b10665ad4e7d@plan9.ucalgary.ca> Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 09:27:40 -0800 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 07ca952c-eacd-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > 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