A number of people have asked me about servers and clients.  Just to
confirm that Henry Pierce and I are working hard to release RPM's pretty
soon with good setup scripts for servers and reasonable documentation.

If you are interested in following Coda developments, sign up for
coda-announce (see www.coda.cs.cmu.edu). It's very low volume. More
discussion is on linux-coda_at_coda.cs.cmu.edu. I am trying not to pollute
the linux-kernel list too badly, so let's move discussion there.

We hope to have them within two weeks, hopefully sooner; we are aiming for
support for libc, glibc, 2.0 and 2.1 kernels (the only untested
combination is servers on glibc at the moment).

When considering Coda as a network filesystem keep in mind:
 - it will only get better if you use it, so please do. 
 - it is not as stable as NFS and it's a much more complex system;
   we try to be helpful, but clearly we have very limited resources.
 - if you play fance games with laptops and replication servers you'll
   encounter more trouble. It's pretty stable for simply replicated 
   connected clients. 
 - there will be changes made to Coda during the next year that will
   require you to reinitialize your server entirely.
 - only level 0 and level 1 backups are supported at present.

Coda uses a log based approach on the servers and the format of the
metadata is going to change -- and probably more than once. 

We have gained a lot from outside users: please play with it when the
rpm's are there.

- Peter Braam -
Senior Systems Scientist 
CMU, SCS
Coda Project - head of Coda development