On Wed, Mar 23, 2005 at 11:29:30AM -0300, Gabriel B. wrote:
> So, anyone here have experience with simpler networked file servers to
> point me in some other direction? my brief experience with coda really
> showed that nfs should be avoided at all costs indeed.

NFS is really the simplest to set up. You could also look at OpenAFS,
which doesn't have RVM and is probably management wise a bit more mature
compared to Coda. Many of the features you learned from Coda, like the
volume management, are surprisingly similar since both evolved from AFS2
and as a result Coda and OpenAFS are sort of siblings. Other people
tried a combination of a nbd (network block device) combined with raid
mirroring/striping. In your case you could even experiment with how
usable a davfs/squid cache combination would be :)

There are also a bunch of userspace filesystems built around FUSE
(http://fuse.sourceforge.net/), haven't really looked at any of them,
but there might be something interesting.

Then there are several userspace solutions that don't require a
networked or distributed filesystem but most of the time these work
quite well. I often recommend programs like rsync, cvs/subversion, and
unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/). It all depends on
the type of syncronization that you need.

Jan