RFS vs. NFS

[G. Roderick Singleton]

In article <649 at setting.weitek.UUCP> robert at setting.weitek.UUCP (Robert Plamondon) writes:
>In article <4496 at megaron.arizona.edu> lm at megaron.arizona.edu.UUCP (Larry McVoy) writes:
>>And a further comment on stateless file systems:  when working on the
>>Apollos, it was rarely, if ever the sort of disaster envisioned by the
>>stateless advocates when a node crashed.  I dunno how, but somehow or
>>other things seemed to work ok.  You noticed that certain trees of
>>files were "gone".  That's all.  Nothing worse.
>
>To me, NOTHING is worse than losing files due to a server crash!  The
>server can burst into flames and slag down on the computer floor for
>all I care, just so long as somewhere in the smoking mass of
>ex-hardware is a disk drive that still has my work on it.  Hardware
>comes and goes, operating systems can be reloaded, but the user's work is
>all-important!

They DON'T disappear, they just become unavailable while things sort
themselves out.  One important thing about RFS that none has mentioned
yet is that it's important to remember during configuration that you
don't put all your eggs in one basket.  That is, don't expect things to
work if you have all the root partitions mounted on the same
filesystem.  I know, I know a pretty extreme example BUT it's so easy
to do that you can do this to important stuff and then grind to a halt
as the result of the sourcing node crashing.  SOOO, losing anything
comes back to the user saving his stuff regularly, et cetera which reduces
the risk to almost that of any single node.


-- 
G. Roderick Singleton, Technical Services Manager
{ syntron | geac | eclectic }!gerry
"ALL animals are created equal, BUT some animals are MORE equal than others."
George Orwell