From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <5eb036eb621fc8ca01d2b10665ad4e7d@plan9.ucalgary.ca> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] Distributed filesystems: Plan 9 vs. Linux From: andrey mirtchovski In-Reply-To: <029c01c3fefe$95f0a430$6539a8c0@hpn5415> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 12:38:51 -0700 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 04ce3806-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. 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