Is OpenAFS Robust Enough to Replace NFS?

eskimoe asks: "Has anyone been playing with (OpenAFS) lately? It looks very promising and claims to be kinda stable now. Unfortunately Google didn't find any reviews when I last searched. This surprised me, considering what I would suspect to be a not-so-small percentage of sysadmins who would absolutely love a secure, not-as-broken-as-nfs, not-depending-on-braindead-RPC-stuff, not-relying-on-client-for-authentication network file system. The other available alternatives such as CODA, various nfs-patches/branches (generally addressing one NFS design-bug at a time while causing more problems) or SMB-only environments have never reached the state of functionality and usability necessary to actually become a serious NFS-killer. So, would you deploy AFS in a production environment, yet? Has anyone tried?"

we're using the client

[Raleel]

We are using the client on our linux machines. WOrks good. the server side is a bigger question

AFS is good

[mattdm]

We use (commercial) AFS extensively at Boston University. We've historically had some trouble with getting updated client software for new operating system versions in a timely matter, so OpenAFS is pretty exciting to us. We have been using arla [stacken.kth.se] as our Linux client, but unfortunately have some serious reliability issues, so we've been testing OpenAFS and will probably ship that in the upcoming BU Linux [bu.edu] 2.0.

I wish it would

[johnjones]

BUT NFS is here to stay because of the intall base

The way OpenAFS is going to get anywhere is by provideing INSTALLERS for Win NT, Win 2000 and linux.

Why ?
By provideing a same way in wich to share your data over ONE transport is something people would like (and dont mind paying a bit for) but the relitive ease of which a SMB & NFS enviroments can exist is the choaker.

I would love this to happen so all credit to the engineers on the project.

regards

john jones

p.s. you wont replace NFS for some time as it is very light weight for clients and so good for that small set top box (-;

Using it in production since February...

[Colitis]

We have a couple of hundred dual-boot workstations
with around 700 total users. So far it's proven to
be *more* reliable than NFS; we've had one
occasion where the server had to be rebooted due
to a non-responsive state. Current uptime is 120
days, with not a hiccup in that time.

Not all of these workstations/users are accessing
the AFS server at once; peak usage is probably
around 100 simultaneous logins, average maybe
20-30 when the whole academic year is taken into
account.

Managing it is much nicer than NFS too. I only
wish we had the budget for a couple more servers
so I can do more with replication and transparent
server upgrades etc.

I'd *never* go back to NFS.

Windows clients?

[1010011010]

Do the OpenAFS Windows clients work? Work well?

It would be nice to be able to use the, I think. Of course, Samba supports AFS, so I could always re-export an AFS volume on local networks via samba.

Re:Windows clients?

[Colitis]

> Do the OpenAFS Windows clients work? Work well?

They work, yes.

Whether they work well...I can't testify as to
their reliability yet. I have an aversion to
Windows so haven't gone very in-depth with it.

How does it work for smaller installations?

[DeVilla]

I always have to move things around on my home machines and I then have to update links and config to point at new locations. I would like to be able to move volumes around transparently. I also like the filesystem snapshots.
Could I make my desktop machines and other boxes both clients and server? Is the overhead bad?

SunSITE.dk uses it

[El Prebso]

We actually use it on sunsite.dk. We provide AFS access to all our hosted project. The load is a bit high sometimes, but is stable.