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Date:      Thu, 29 Apr 1999 07:27:21 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Robert Watson <robert@cyrus.watson.org>
To:        "David E. Cross" <crossd@cs.rpi.edu>
Cc:        freebsd-afs@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: a new beginning
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.3.96.990429071718.8896D-100000@fledge.watson.org>
In-Reply-To: <199904290437.AAA12331@cs.rpi.edu>

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On Thu, 29 Apr 1999, David E. Cross wrote:

> Well, the port of AFS 3.4 to FreeBSD was pretty much a complete failure. 
> I had attempted to restart it later from scratch, but gave up when I
> found 3.5 was just arround the corner and was going to be a large re-org
> of everything.  3.5 is here, and I am going to start again.  I will be
> asking many bone-headed questions about AFS itself and the VFS/VM
> interface to FreeBSD.  please bear with me, I know very little about
> this.  I am eager to learn though :) 

Given the availability of Arla, is there a reason we still want to port
the Transarc AFS client?  Wouldn't it be more productive to get really
bored and write a BSD-licensed AFS server for FreeBSD, making FreeBSD the
ultimate free network server platform? :)  This wouldn't necessarily
involve learning FreeBSD VM/VFS because you don't have to do the Transarc
direct inode-open thing, and if you really wanted to the Arla module could
easily be made to do that.  They already have the initial framework for a
server (all the backend RPC call names and some setup and examples). 

If there is interest in writing a free AFS server, I may have a month of
time I could devote to it this summer.  My suspicion is that this would be
an incredibly worthwhile project, given the availability of a free client
already.  No doubt the KTH folk are interested in doing this already, but
last I spoke to them (Assar was here in Pittsburgh about a month ago) they
hadn't started yet.  We already have Quorum code that was originally
intended for Coda, but hasn't gone in there yet (BSD-licensed), and there
are some folk around here who have various components that could go into
it, hopefully all also liberally licensed.

  Robert N Watson 

robert@fledge.watson.org              http://www.watson.org/~robert/
PGP key fingerprint: AF B5 5F FF A6 4A 79 37  ED 5F 55 E9 58 04 6A B1

Carnegie Mellon University            http://www.cmu.edu/
TIS Labs at Network Associates, Inc.  http://www.tis.com/
Safeport Network Services             http://www.safeport.com/



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