What is the Best Remote Filesystem?

GaelenBurns asks: "I've got a project that I'd like the Slashdot community's opinion of. We have two distant office buildings and a passel of windows users that need to be able to access the files on either office's Debian server from either location through Samba shares. We tend to think that AFS would be the best choice for mounting a remote file system and keeping data synchronized, but we're having trouble finding documentation that coherently explains installing AFS. Furthermore, NFS doesn't seem like a good option, since I've read that it doesn't fail gracefully should the net connection ever drop. Others, such as Coda and Intermezzo, seem to be stuck in development, and therefore aren't sufficiently stable. I know tools for this must exist, please enlighten me."

Re:three letters

[OrangeSpyderMan]

"CVS is not the answer, CVS is the question - the answer is no!"

Can't remember where I saw that quote first (LKML??) but I think it sums things up quite nicely... :-)

FAT16

[turg]

I think FAT16 is the best remote filesystem -- I like it best when FAT16 is as remote from myself as possible.

sneaker.net

[turgid]

Back in the day, we were forced to use sneaker.net (TM). It worked quite well, even on MS-DOS workstations with 512k RAM, and the 80286 processor and still works to this day. Reliability is so-so, and speed can be poor, but nowadays with technological progress transfer rates can be the orders of gigabytes per second, but latencies are large (tens of seconds upwards to several days). One downside was the propagation of viruses, but distribution of code across platforms by source and proper protected mode operating systems with selectable user privileges make viruses less dangerous.