On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 5:06 PM Clem Cole wrote: > On Sun, Jul 5, 2020 at 4:42 PM John Cowan wrote: > >> I always used the design principle "Write locally, read over NFS". >> > This was the basic idea of AFS. Originally, the CMU folks did whole file > caching, but by AFS 4.0 time, they had a Locus token manager (think DLM) > that scaled really well so partial caching was allowed. It actually made a > small disk system possible. What tended to happen, on your first boot, of > course, you had to fill /bin and lot of heavily used directories. But > what happened is that your system quickly had only the files you really > needed on the local disk. - the ones you were writing, and the few you > used over and over. > > FWIW: I know a couple of people that still run it. I ran it until a few > years ago when I switched NAS units just for cost reasons. > There was a neat paper out of CERN a few years ago about how they're turning down their AFS (now OpenAFS) cells. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/898/6/062040/pdf It seems that the idea of a big, shared, distributed file namespace is sadly disappearing. I feel like most of the web-based replacements are not as seamlessly integrated with my preferred toolset as what they're replacing, but I've also become more and more acutely aware that I am not the target audience for those things. Certainly, real-time collaboration via e.g. Google Drive is pretty amazing and very dynamic, particularly when paired with e.g. real-time video chat, but it also forces one into a particular model of interaction that I've spent most of the last three decades consciously avoiding but now find no escape from. - Dan C.