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

[andrey mirtchovski <mirtchov@cpsc.ucalgary.ca>]

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.
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.

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?
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)...

Plan 9 lets you do something elegantly, bringing the result to the
outside world may be a bit trickier :)

my $0.02: andrey