[buug] AFS vs NFS

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bill Honeycutt (wfhoney at pacbell.net):

> Could someone explain the relative merits (or demerits) of using AFS as 
> opposed to NFS?

AFS has strong-crypto authentication and encryption, is a slow, complex,
heavy-weight protocol, and is a bear to set up and administer.  Coda
attempted to sort of clone that, but itself proved too ponderous, so
project leader Peter Braam jumped ship and is slowly improving a
from-scratch replacement, InterMezzo.

NFS has No Friggin' Security, is relatively lightweight and simple, and 
is no real problem to set up and administer.

> Where would AFS best applied in a practical sense?

The classic deployment would be a college environment:  People both on
and off campus can use AFS/Kerberos to get to centrally stored files on
the AFS "cells".

Thanks to IBM/Transarc open-sourcing the Transarc AFS implementation
under the IBM Public Licence as "OpenAFS", AFS can now be done using all
open-source software.

-- 
Cheers,                                      "My file system's got no nodes!"
Rick Moen                                    "How does it shell?"
rick at linuxmafia.com