(Illustration by Gaich Muramatsu)
Coda Distributed File System, version 5.2 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 our WWW site: http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu If you are using Coda or have had trouble using it, please send us some feedback at: http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/feedback.html There is a wealth of documents, papers, and theses on our WWW site. 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/doc/html/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 2.2: i386 & sparc Freebsd 2.2.x: i386 Freebsd current: i386 NetBSD 1.3x: i386 & sparc NetBSD current: i386 There are also alpha releases for: Windows 95 & 98 -- 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 codalist. We appreciate comments, feedback, bug reports, bug fixes, enhancements, etc. Changes: summary of some of the differences since 5.0.x * Updated documentation. * New protection database (simplyfies user administration). * Removed obsolete venus-vice rpc2 calls. * Server support for trickle fetch and fetch continuations. * Improved support on the Windows platforms. * Avoid deadlocks in the rpc2 binding sequence. * Added support for FreeBSD 4.0 (Robert Watson) * Testing for -fno-exceptions in configure script. * Switching fetches between volume replicas. * Removed the need for -child flag on Win95. * Nice GUI frontend on Windows for starting/stopping venus. (Michael Callahan and Marc Schnieder) * Fixed @sys/@cpu expansions in venus, and allow setuid bits. * Added @sys/@cpu commands to cfs to show the `current' expansion. * Normal symlinks were sometimes mistaken for inconsistent objects. * Fixed a linux-coda kernel problem in lookup * Fixed several bugs in the volume package 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: clients need to be reinitialized - disk format for server: backward compatible Peter Braam Bob Baron Jan Harkes Marc SchniederReceived on 1999-03-16 17:19:47