Derek Simkowiak writes: 

>> just have 2 computers that are going to be using the data,
> 
> 	It will first be two, but then should grow up to "several" nodes. 
> 

the firewire code in linux supports 4 hosts connecting to one device. as do 
most of the firewire drives. Fibre channel supports lots more than that as 
far as I know. I don't know about shared SCSI(2?). 

>> try just a cluster{ed|ing} file system.
> 
> 	That's what I'm after.  How is CODA not a "cluster{ed|ing}"
> filesystem? 
> 

I didn't mean it wasn't, I just normally see it used for it's client caching 
ablility, and that seems to be it's strong point. 

see also Jan's reply 

>> OpenGFS,
> 
> 	http://opengfs.org has been down (for the last few days at least),
> there has been only 1 message posted to the support mailing list this year
> (in April!), and no updates released since January.  Does not seem
> suitable because there is not a real-world production user base that I can
> find. 
> 

try opengfs.sourceforge.net the guy who owns opengfs.org let it go and I 
haven't been able to re-register it. 

It is stable code, even the old releases. If you want to look at it I 
suggest you look at cvs instead. We are close to a new release with some 
bugfixes and we made it use automake/autoconf. 

>> Oracle Cluster File System,
> 
> 	Too expensive for this project. 
> 

OCFS is free. go to: 

http://ocfs.otncast.otnxchange.oracle.com/servlets/ProjectHome 

the code is free.(you may have to register)
(you are probably looking at internet file system) 


>> or one of the others.
> 
> 	What others?  I'm willing to consider alternatives to CODA, but I
> know of none.  OpenAFS's replication is read-only, not read-write, and
> frankly seems as admin-heavy as CODA.  Also, this cluster is an experiment
> in complete node homogeneity.  I want to use the big hard drives of my
> nodes instead of additional hard drives on yet-more-hardware ($$$). 
> 

I have a simple Heartbeat pair running web/mail off of a firewire drive. 
works fine if you use a few patches. I can tell you more if you are 
interested. I don't know how much stress you are going to be putting on the 
setup you want. There are many other possibilities(FC, shared scsi, etc). 

Some other fs's:
Lustre-I follow this one, it is coming along very nicely, you can check it's 
status at lustre.org. Don't know if this fits your needs as far as tons of 
users in the field.
Sistina's GFS-this is what started OpenGFS and Sistina closed the source. 
Not sure if this is what you want as far as $$$ is concerned, but they have 
quite a few clients from what I understand. 

There are others. My mind is just mush now from looking at DLM and GFS code 
for too long. 

> 
> --Derek 
>