[UFO Chicago] Network fileshares

[Ian Bicking]

On Thu, 2002-11-21 at 02:26, Nate Riffe wrote:
> SFS is great when it's working, but I gave up on it.  YMMV.

Yeah, you make it sound too hard.  I'm just looking for convenience, and
am easily distracted from hard solutions.

> > There's also the possibility of using CVS as a sort of networked
> > filesystem.  Have other people tried this?  I'm still not really
> > comfortable with CVS, though I've finally gotten used to the basics.  It
> > does offer some other useful features besides networking...
> 
> CVS is very manual.  Every modification on a CVS client "mount" would
> have to be committed back to the CVS by issuing a 'cvs ci' command,
> which may be possible if the client machine were running HURD and the
> CVS mount were handled by yet another weird kernel service.  And the
> repository would not function as a local filesystem on the server
> where it is located, like an NFS share does (or for that matter, the
> shares of any networked filesystem that I can think of).

CVS is something I feel I should come to terms with.  Even now that I've
found LUFS... which I definitely plan to use, until it breaks horribly
for me, which is bound to happen... I still feel I should be using CVS
for more.  It requires manual intervention, but in general versioning is
something that deserves that intervention.

It would be hard for files that I'd like to update live, but there's
lots of stuff -- especially web projects I work on -- where I shouldn't
be doing that anyway.  I should be updating, testing, and then finally
exporting to the live location.

> > Any other ideas?  (I'm searching for optimal productivity, one piece of
> > the environment at a time.)
> 
> Dare I say Samba?  I generally reserve Samba for sharing stuff to and
> mounting stuff from actual Windows machines, but you may find it of
> use in this instance.
> 
> I'm actually also looking for a good encrypted, cryptographically
> authenticated, and preferrably compressed network filesystem that
> follows UNIX filesystem semantics and fails gracefully in the presence
> of network failures or inavailability.

Perhaps you should look at Coda again.  It still seemed hard to me, but
the feature list is pretty good; at least if you want completeness.  It
even had an offline mode.  It didn't look quite as annoying as perhaps
it was last time you looked.  Though I didn't look deep enough to find
the really messy stuff.

  Ian