(Illustration by Gaich Muramatsu)
Coda Distributed File System, version 5.0.0 Coda is a distributed file system like NFS and AFS. It is freely available under the GPL. It functions somewhat like AFS in being a "stateful" file system. Coda and AFS cache files on your local machine to improve performance. But Coda goes a step further than AFS by letting you access the cached files when there is no available network, viz. disconnected laptops and network outages. Coda also has read write replication servers. The Coda file server is outside the kernel and on the client theCoda cache manager Venus is again outside of the kernel, but on clients one needs a kernel module. To get more information on Coda, check out http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu There is a wealth of documents, papers, and theses there. There is also a good introduction to the Coda File System in http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/ljpaper/lj.html and a Coda-HOWTO: http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/coda-howto.html Coda was originally developed as an academic prototype/testbed. It is being polished and rewritten where necessary. Coda is a work in progress and does have bugs. It is, though, very usable. Our interest is in making Coda available to as many people as possible and to have Coda evolve and flourish. The bulk of the Coda file system code supports the Coda client program, the Coda server program and the utilities needed by both. All these programs are unix programs and can run equally well on any Unix platform. Our main development thrust is improving these programs. There is a small part of Coda that deals with the kernel to file system interface. This code is OS specific (but should not be platform specific). Coda is currently available for several OS's and platforms: linux 2.0: i386 & sparc linux 2.1: i386 & sparc Freebsd-2.2.5: i386 Freebsd-2.2.6: i386 Freebsd -current: i386 NetBSD 1.3: i386 NetBSD -current: i386 New in this release are alpha releases for: Windows 95 -- Coda client Windows NT -- Coda server The relevant sources, binaries, and docs can be found in ftp://ftp.coda.cs.cmu.edu/pub/coda/ There are several mailing lists @coda.cs.cmu.edu that discuss coda: coda-announce and linux-coda. We are going to revise linux-coda to be OS neutral, since it is mainly Coda we want to discuss. We appreciate comments, feedback, bug reports, bug fixes, enhancements, etc. Changes since our previous release have been very extensive. The ChangeLog lists them in more detail but the most important ones are: - a totally new directory system throughout the clients and servers (this eliminates some of the nastiest bugs Coda had, but there might be some bugs left in the new code). - very much improved handling of weak connectivity on the client and disconnected operation. (Peter now takes his email home in Coda and comes back the next morning to reintegrate.) - fixed many annoyances with losing connections. - fixed a few nasty deadlocks in the transaction handling - fixed several buffer overflow problems Coda remains an experimental system, but in comparison with 4.6.6 our last major release, the usability has improved very much. Please let us know about problems, since we will try to fix them right away. Compatibility with previous versions: - network protocol: can coexists with 4.6.7 and later - disk format client: can only coexists with 5.0pre1 - disk format for server: backward compatible The Coda Team ------------- Peter Braam Bob Baron Jan Harkes Marc Schnieder coda_at_cs.cmu.eduReceived on 1999-01-14 17:43:41