Coda FS [was: tlug: bells and pings]

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Simon" == Simon Cozens <simon@example.com> writes:

    Simon> I've also heard good things about Coda.

I don't know that I'd recommend Coda at the present time.  It could
and did wedge itself pretty badly as of 5.2.0, and they are still
making protocol changes at version 5 (!) so that upgrading means doing 
everything simultaneously and typically reinitializing the venus
(client) cache.  This could cause data loss.

5.3 is supposed to be vastly improved, and the people at CMU basically 
keep all their files there, so in principle it's stable.  But it does
require much more administrator skills and attention than NFS.

Also, remember that Tony is a little resource-constrained on that box.
vice (the server) requires huge amounts of virtual memory (I wouldn't
run vice and venus at the same time---the only way the server can see
the files it is serving---with less than 64MB of RAM and at least as
much swap besides), and moderately large (by server standards, say
about 250MB minimum) amounts of disk for cache and transactions
logging) and venus can use large amounts of disk for cache (100MB is
considered a minimum by people who really use Coda for all their work;
I would use at least 400MB, since I would probably put my Linux and
XEmacs source trees on Coda, and then I've got my MP3 collection ;-)

You can squeeze the resources, but that's like conducting a DOS attack 
on yourself ;-)

Maybe I'll try it out again soon (the coda stuff was on a disk that
crashed, I don't have space to do a simple restore back to the server
and I'd want to upgrade anyway).

-- 
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