(Illustration by Gaich Muramatsu)
Hi. I am setting up a remote office set-up for a client. The people in question shut down their main office here in Dallas, and were told by their boss to work from their homes. They run a variety of applications and needed an effective way to share files/applications/etc btw them. ADSL connections were gotten for all of the workers in the office. All links are 1.5 megabits per second downlink, and 128kilobits per second uplink. The first solutions I tried were SAMBA over VPN style links (I tried an IPSEC stack and Microsofts PPTP implimentation.) These posed a severe latency problem because ALL I/O was synchronously done to and from the server, certain applications appeared frozen because the applications were waiting on the I/O to complete! The clients and I agreed that this was an unacceptable solution. So work progressed to find an effective solution that provided the responsiveness they needed with the unified filesystem they also required. At first, I remembered that AFS could solve the problem. However, I still can not find a windows 95 AFS client. I had a friend at Stanford who told me they had a Win95/98 client but the link to the software is very recently defunct. That's when I remembered CODA. Coda's features fit perfectly with what was needed, so I installed it and got it running. (btw, I notice that there are a lot of 'coda-and-CMU-specific-jargon' that I am not firmiliar with, but I am able to understand it enough to have it running properly.) A couple of questions, 1. What parameters should I set for rpc2 and sftp for suitable packet queue sizes and timeout values for an ADSL connection like the one I described above? 2. I noticed that I can share a coda filestorage via samba and get to the shares this way. (I have set up a small samba fileserver at each remote location which uses the linux coda client to connect to the SCM and server cluster over at our establishment where the data is being housed.) ... Is there a way to do an automatic login with clog ?? (i.e. force-feeding clog the password somehow?) 3. Is the windows 9x client being maintained at all? I tried it and it seemed extremely unstable (of course, that was in your disclaimer so I am not pointing fingers. hehehe.) 4. If coda won't work, is there a win9x AFS client I can find?? I'm desparate! Regardless of what happens with this client.. The stability and flexibility that coda has shown on the UNIX side has shown me that I can use it here at our establishment for our file storage needs.. An excellent system! Great work guys, Coda kicks ass! Thanks, Thom Cherryhomes - CTO / OPENMINDS Inc. (Customer Liberation Through Free Software Solutions)Received on 2001-06-15 15:38:13