1998-08-29 21:14:52 +00:00
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Announcing the Availability of the
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Coda Distributed
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Filesystem
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for
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BSD Unix Systems
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Coda is a distributed file system like NFS and AFS. It is
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freely available, like NFS. But it functions much like AFS in being a
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"stateful" file system. Coda and AFS cache files on your local
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machine to improve performance. But Coda goes a step further than AFS
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by letting you access the cached files when there is no available
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network, viz. disconnected laptops and network outages. In Coda, both
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the client and server are outside the kernel which makes them easier
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to experiment with.
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To get more information on Coda, I would like to refer people to
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http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu
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1998-09-02 19:09:53 +00:00
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There is a wealth of documents, papers, and theses there. There is
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also a good introduction to the Coda File System in
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1998-08-29 21:14:52 +00:00
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http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/ljpaper/lj.html
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Coda was originally developed as an academic prototype/testbed. It is
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being polished and rewritten where necessary. Coda is a work in
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progress and does have bugs. It is, though, very usable. Our
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interest is in making Coda available to as many people as possible and
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to have Coda evolve and flourish.
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The bulk of the Coda file system code supports the Coda client
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program, the Coda server program and the utilities needed by both.
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All these programs are unix programs and can run equally well on any
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Unix platform. Our main development thrust is improving these
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programs. There is a small part of Coda that deals with the kernel to
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file system interface. This code is OS specific (but should not be
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platform specific).
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Coda is currently available for several OS's and platforms:
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Freebsd-2.2.5: i386
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Freebsd-2.2.6: i386
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Freebsd -current: i386
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linux 2.0: i386 & sparc
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linux 2.1: i386 & sparc
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NetBSD 1.3: i386
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NetBSD -current: i386
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The relevant sources, binaries, and docs can be found in
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ftp://ftp.coda.cs.cmu.edu/pub/coda/
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We intend to come out with new Coda releases often, not daily. We
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1998-09-02 19:09:53 +00:00
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don't want to slight any OS/platform not mentioned above. We are just
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1998-08-29 21:14:52 +00:00
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limited in our resources as to what we can support internally. We
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will be happy to integrate OpenBSD support as well as other OS
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1998-09-02 19:09:53 +00:00
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support. Also, adding platform support should be relatively easy and
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we can discuss this. The only difficulty is that Coda has a light weight
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1998-08-29 21:14:52 +00:00
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process package. It does some manipulations in assembler which would
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have to be redone for a different platform.
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There are several mailing lists @coda.cs.cmu.edu that discuss coda:
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coda-announce and linux-coda. We are going to revise linux-coda to be
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OS neutral, since it is mainly Coda we want to discuss. We appreciate
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comments, feedback, bug reports, bug fixes, enhancements, etc.
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