I just find this highly ironic considering this is NFS we are talking about. Also, do they fear their ISPs changing the 40 year old NFS specs on the flight or what ? Why even mention this ?
I don't need to "remember NFS", NFS is a big part of my day!
What I learned though was that NFS was great until it wasn't. If the server hung, all work stopped.
When I got to reddit, solving code distribution was one of the first tasks I had to take care of. Steve wanted to use NFS to distribute the app code. He wanted to have all the app servers mount an NFS mount, and then just update the code there and have them all automatically pick up the changes.
This sounded great in theory, but I told him about all the gotchas. He didn't believe me, so I pulled up a bunch of papers and blog posts, and actually set up a small cluster to show him what happens when the server goes offline, and how none of the app servers could keep running as soon as they had to get anything off disk.
To his great credit, he trusted me after that when I said something was a bad idea based on my experience. It was an important lesson for me that even with experience, trust must be earned when you work with a new team.
I set up a system where app servers would pull fresh code on boot and we could also remotely trigger a pull or just push to them, and that system was reddit's deployment tool for about a decade (and it was written in Perl!)
holoduke•1h ago
rootnod3•1h ago
hnlmorg•1h ago
SMB is a nightmare to set up if your host isn’t running Windows.
sshfs is actually pretty good but it’s not exactly ubiquitous. Plus it has its own quirks and performs slower. So it really doesn’t feel like an upgrade.
Everything else I know of is either proprietary, or hard to set up. Or both.
These days everything has gone more cloud-oriented. Eg Dropbox et al. And I don’t want to sync with a cloud server just to sync between two local machines.
jjtheblunt•52m ago
I looked, found the link below, but it seems to just fizzle out without info.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCE_Distributed_File_System
Anyway, we used it extensively in the UIUC engineering workstation labs hundreds of computers, 20+ years ago, and it worked excellently. I set up a server farm 20 years ago of Sun sparcs but used NFS for such.
convolvatron•33m ago
plusses were security (kerberos), better administrative controls and global file space.
minuses were generally poor performance, middling small file support and awful large file support. substantial administrative overhead. the wide-area performance was so bad the global namespace thing wasn't really useful.
I guess it didn't cause as many actual multi-hour outages NFS, but we used it primarily for home/working directories and left the servers alone, whereas the accepted practice at the time was to use NFS for roots and to cross mount everything so that it easily got into a 'help I've fallen and can't get up' situation.
toast0•39m ago
Samba runs fine on my FreeBSD host? All my clients are Windows though.
If I wanted to have a non-windows desktop client, I'd probably use NFS for the same share.
hnlmorg•31m ago
It's one of those tools that, unless you already know what you're doing, you can expect to sink several hours into trying to get the damn thing working correctly.
It's not the kind of thing you can throw at a junior and expect them to get working in an afternoon.
Whereas NFS and sshfs "just work". Albeit I will concede that NFSv4 was annoying to get working back when that was new too. But that's, thankfully, a distant memory.
fodkodrasz•30m ago
NFS support was lacking on windows when I last tried. I used NFS (v3) a lot in the past, but unless in a highly static high trust environment, it was worse to use than SMB (for me). Especially the user-id mapping story is something I'm not sure is solved properly. That was a PITA in the homelab scale, having to set up NIS was really something I didn't like, a road warrior setup didn't work well for me, I quickly abandoned it.
hnlmorg•24m ago
Samba can be. Especially when compared with NFS
> NFS support was lacking on windows when I last tried.
If you need to connect from Windows then your options are very limited, unfortunately.
NexRebular•13m ago
It's very easy on illumos based systems due the integrated SMB/CIFS service.
Spivak•5m ago
I've always thought that NFS makes you choose between two bad alternatives with "stop the world and wait" or "fail in a way that apps are not prepared for."
q3k•41m ago