Coda Distributed File System, version 5.2.4

Coda is a distributed file system like NFS and AFS. It is freely
available under the GPL. It functions somewhat like AFS in being a
"stateful" file system. Coda and AFS cache files on your local
machine to improve performance. But Coda goes a step further than AFS
by letting you access the cached files when there is no available
network, viz. disconnected laptops and network outages. Coda also has
read write replication servers. The Coda file server is outside the
kernel and on the client the Coda cache manager Venus is again outside
of the kernel, but on clients one needs a kernel module.

To get more information on Coda, check out our WWW site:

http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu

If you are using Coda or have had trouble using it, please send us
some feedback at:

http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/feedback.html

There is a wealth of documents, papers, and theses on our WWW
site. There is also a good introduction to the Coda File System in

http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/ljpaper/lj.html

and a Coda-HOWTO:

http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/doc/html/coda-howto.html

Coda was originally developed as an academic prototype/testbed. It is
being polished and rewritten where necessary. Coda is a work in
progress and does have bugs. It is, though, very usable. Our
interest is in making Coda available to as many people as possible and
to have Coda evolve and flourish.

The bulk of the Coda file system code supports the Coda client
program, the Coda server program and the utilities needed by both.
All these programs are unix programs and can run equally well on any
Unix platform. Our main development thrust is improving these
programs. There is a small part of Coda that deals with the kernel to
file system interface. This code is OS specific (but should not be
platform specific).

Coda is currently available for several OS's and platforms:

linux 2.0: i386 & sparc
linux 2.2: i386 & sparc
Freebsd 2.2.x: i386
Freebsd current: i386
NetBSD 1.3x: i386 & sparc
NetBSD current: i386

There are also alpha releases for:

Windows 95 & 98 -- Coda client
Windows NT      -- Coda server

The relevant sources, binaries, and docs can be found in

ftp://ftp.coda.cs.cmu.edu/pub/coda/

There are several mailing lists @coda.cs.cmu.edu that discuss coda:
coda-announce and codalist. We appreciate comments, feedback, bug reports,
bug fixes, enhancements, etc.

Changes:  summary of some of the differences since 5.2.0
    * Protection database fileformat changed to use libdb1.85.
    * Again many changes in the rpc2/sftp retransmission code. Along
      with several changes to adapt more actively to disconnections.
    * Fixed some memory leaks (even RVM was being leaked).
    * More reliability when starting clients disconnected.
    * Removed a lot of unused resolution code from the servers.
    * Directories did not resolve correctly.
    * Fixed the chance of losing reintegration records after venus
      reinitialization.
    * Avoid uninitialized data and buffer overflows when auth2 and
      volutil tokens are not exactly 8 characters.
    * Integrated relay into venus, and lots of win95 improvements
      (it's been getting lot faster and more reliable now).

Please let us know about problems, since we will try to fix them right away.

Compatibility with previous versions:

- network protocol: can coexists with 4.6.7 and later
- pdb databases have changed to libdb 1.85 format as of version 5.2.3
  (see http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/useradmin-mini-HOWTO.html for more info)
- disk format client: clients need to be reinitialized
- disk format for server: backward compatible

Jan Harkes
Marc Schnieder
Peter Braam
Bob Baron