From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v750) In-Reply-To: References: <26857.1147489314@piper.nectar.cs.cmu.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Message-Id: <90BB8E89-C38B-4FE6-972A-B9404005DCD6@mit.edu> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: chad brown Subject: Re: [9fans] history question ("Athena's OldFiles") Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2006 12:31:37 -0400 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Topicbox-Message-UUID: 59bc191a-ead1-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 In case anyone cares... Athena started using AFS in the late 80's, and switched mostly wholesale in the early 90's. OldFiles comes directly from that time. Athena was using Kerberos authentication in AFS right from the start -- and I believe is still using the home-grown Kerberos support, not the stuff that CMU added to AFS shortly thereafter. *chad On May 12, 2006, at 11:01 PM, Dave Eckhardt wrote: > According to http://cm.bell-labs.com/plan9/about.html: > Slowly, ideas from Plan 9 are being adopted by other systems. > [...] The dump file system has been mimicked in Athena's > OldFiles directories or Network Appliance's .snapshot > directories. > > I don't know much about Athena, but I believe OldFiles > has been the name for "yesterday's read-only snapshot" > in AFS since the mid 1980's. The snapshot is mentioned, > although not by name, in Section 6.5 ("Backup") of > "Scale and Performance in a Distributed File System" > (Howard et al., ACM TOCS, Feb. 1988), which documents > AFS as of early 1987. > > My vague understanding, which could be wrong, is that > in the late 80's or early 90's, there was cross-fertilization > when Athena switched from NFS to AFS, and AFS switched > from home-grown authentication to Kerberos. If so the > appearance of OldFiles at MIT may well be after, but not > caused by, the Plan 9 WORM file server's dump tree. > > Dave Eckhardt