[SLUG] NFS talk at SLUG

[Jamie Honan <jhonan@nospam.optushome.com.au>]

Niel Brown gave a talk last night at SLUG about the Linux
implementation of NFS.

I'd be hard pressed to summarise his talk. Niels' slides
may go up on our web site, which among other things will
show which kernel has which set of patches. (Gus may 
elaborate).

Niels' subtitle was the politics and personalities involved
in NFS in the kernel. There wasn't much politics, but
I was impressed with Niels' sense of community with the
ongoing implementation and support of NFS in Linux.

Niel helps administer the systems at the school of computer
sciences at UNSW. The way they are working is with
a large NFS server.

Reading between the lines, they have been let down by various
vendors over the years. I had the sense this was a major motivation
in them picking an open source solution instead of turning to
a vendor, once again. 

At the end I idly asked about going one step further than just
doing file serving, what about running stuff on a server and
just using Xterms.

CSE at UNSW had gone down this path at one stage, with bitter
memories. Again there was a sense of having been let down by
a major vendor.

Other people in the audience had similar experiences, and this
is where I'm hoping to get a bit of feedback and discussion.

Jeff and Gus recounted experiences at Sydney Uni, which had tried
this. I gather that this was the impetus for the development of
Share. Share is now a product of Aurema (formerly Softway :- where
Peter Chubb works - second affirmative speaker, and Charlie
Brady used to work).

Niel and Gus mentioned problems such as /tmp filling up, students
over-using resources (Gus mentioned bandwidth - I would imagine
that now you would probably use an Etherswitch in conjunction with
an NFS server). These problems are tackled by Share, which is a
fair resource allocation system.

I guess the thing about Uni computer labs is the unpredictable
nature of usage. Mainframes - which would be the extreme case of
a central processor server - do work, but the workload is planned
and scheduled, almost with loving care! :)

I wonder if a reasonable chunk of Share was open-sourced then
it wouldn't become a defacto part of every Unix system?

Sorry for long winded post. Many thanks to Niel, and the other speakers
last night, and the organisers. It was certainly stimulating.

I was hoping to generate some followup discussion.

Regards
Jamie

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