[Macpartners] Filesystem virtualization for AFP

[mark pearrow]

I think Douglas implied the problem in his last message: it's painful  
to grow AFP volumes or to transparently migrate a volume to a new  
location. AFP inherently requires the end user to know the physical  
host that a volume is attached to (as does CIFS, although as Douglas  
mentioned DFS tries to overcome this problem)

We (csail) use AFS to overcome these issues, but especially on OS X,  
OpenAFS is difficult to integrate (into the "Mac Way" for example)   
and requires a lot of pain and tolerance on the behalf of everyone  
involved. If Apple provided a secure, distributed filesystem that  
integrated easily into OpenDirectory's schema and that was robust  
against network changes (Mac goes to sleep, comes back up, filesystem  
is still there; or, Mac goes from one wireless SSID to another and  
the filesystem is still there), it would be a huge win.

 From an end user's standpoint,
- you should not have to know the gnarly internals of where a  
particular data volume "lives" - it should just be part of a namespace.
- you should not have to treat the filesystem with kid gloves - it  
should survive changing network conditions and security updates.
- you should not have to restart Finder constantly to make it  
recognize ACL changes.
- you should not have to worry about inconsistencies in files due to  
client-side caching issues. (rollback & commit)

 From a system administrator's standpoint,
- you should be able to add volumes to the namespace without needing  
to update every single client.
- you should be able to migrate a volume from one physical device to  
another (disk, host, etc.) without a service outage or volume downtime.
- you should not have to alter OpenDirectory or perform feats of  
magic to use the filesystem as a home directory.
- you should not have to hand-edit obscure system config files that  
change format unexpectedly with new OS versions.
- the filesystem should use standardized and strong authentication/ 
authorization means.

Apple should either brew such a filesystem (and hopefully provide  
cross-platform means) or co-opt AFS and make it "just work".

my $.02

mjp