On Fri, May 03, 2002 at 08:32:33AM -0500, Dave Sherohman wrote: > On Fri, May 03, 2002 at 08:06:14AM -0500, nate at refried.org wrote: > > NFS > > - Uses UNIX native permissions > > - Uses standard unix file system tools (chmod, chown, etc) > > > AFS > > - Uses fine grained ACLs (read, lookup, insert, delete, write, lock, > > admin) > > - Comes with it's own file system tools (fs, pts, etc) > > Are these supposed to pe points in AFS's favor? Not necessarily. For a small, less organized environment AFS is probably overkill. For a larger, centralized environment AFS solves many of the scalability and administration issues. Believe me, when you have thousands of users organized into hundreds of randomly distributed and overlapping groups, AFS is a godsend. > I don't think that trying to show them how to use something more > complex would get very far. Ditto on having two distinct sets of > filesystem tools. Every tool takes some training to use. Usually people learn a few things about a tool and that's enough for them to do their job. Others like to learn every feature of a tool. Your users don't have to learn anything about AFS to start using it. If they want to do something that AFS support and NFS doesn't, they'll have to learn a thing or two. > > Not that I wanted to start an NFS vs AFS flamewar. > > Me neither. I know nothing about AFS except what's on your bullet > lists. But, having seen them, I can't see why anyone would willingly > use AFS unless it's in a 100% AFS environment. I think when most institutions set up AFS, they plan on using it for everything. It's not like, "I need to get to these files from another computer so I'll export this file system." It's more like, "We need a really big secure centralized file server with real security and scalability that the entire campus can use." > Even then, switching command sets seems like a high price to pay, as > it means discarding a large hunk of prior knowledge and rendering a > substantial majority of *nix reference materials irrelevant. Just to be clear, it's only some of the admin and permissions control commands that need supplementing. mkdir, find, grep, cp, ln, etc all work as they are supposed to. It's just that chmod, chown, chgrp, etc can't handle the granularity that AFS supports.