> At some distant point in the past (last century, actually) > I was drawn to AFS because of the features, but left in > horror because of the complexity.
The goal was adding an enterprise-scale distributed file system to an existing operating system (Unix), where "enterprise-scale" meant 5,000 users (the first prototype supported 400 users on 120 workstations in 1984; this evening CMU's AFS cell hosts 30,821 user volumes, roughly half a gigabyte each; there are cells with more users and cells with more bits. It may be the case that 25 years later NFSv4 solves all the same problems with greater elegance--which would be good, because civilization should advance, and it really is useful for a community of 30k people to seamlessly share files. > I guess it doesn't really matter if your environment is > being managed by a good IT -- you just reap the benefits. > But as a tinkerer, I wouldn't call AFS malleable. A 747 isn't as malleable as an ultralight. If you can figure out how to carry several hundred people across an ocean in something as easy to build and maintain as an ultralight, people will most definitely take notice. And such a thing could be the case for distributed file systems. Dave Eckhardt P.S. Here's some rationale behind the horrific complexity: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~satya/docdir/p35-satyanarayanan.pdf
