Coda File System

Re: Coda newbie

From: <u+codalist-wk5r_at_chalmers.se>
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2008 10:39:20 +0200
Hi Andy,

On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 02:41:43PM -0700, Andy Valencia wrote:
> So proceed with caution.  As far as I can tell, Coda doesn't scale to
> modern media sizes.  And you will want a non-Coda backup system which is
> run often enough to stay very current.  And I wouldn't recommend
 ...
> Sorry to sound so negative, but my experiences really didn't lead me to
> believe that Coda is ready for a production environment.

Thanks for sharing the experience, it is a pity Coda didn't quite work for you.

Coda suitability depends a lot on the usage pattern,
it is not universal (nor is any other distributed file system)
nor bug-free (same for other systems, but Coda for a very long time
had very limited developer resources compared e.g. to AFS).

For a "highly motivated and loyal user" Coda is certainly very suitable
and useful. Checked for oldest files in my directories on Coda, including
the one normally used as "homedir" and some dates are from before 2003.
This means I dwell on Coda since realms came into existence.

No, this was not for a fainthearted, but nowadays 1. Coda is a lot better
2. I know the limits better :)
so it works pretty well (touching wood :)

Given a knowledgeable person in proximity, even mere mortals survive
on Coda, if they learn how to reconize the signs of trouble and call for help.

I would not risk moving more end users to Coda than I can provide
"immediate" support to, i.e. support which they percept as immediate,
Conflict resolution by a guru within five minutes is a good starting point.

The highest threshold while moving to Coda is education, both for the users,
for the helpdesk staff and for the admins.
The next one is tuning the applications so that they do not cause unnoying
and unnecessary conflicts ("mozilla", "bash", "less" come to mind immediately).

Regards,
Rune
Received on 2008-07-26 04:39:13