"Cloud" software ?

[Ciprian Dorin Craciun]

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 12:42 PM, Frank Staals <frank at fstaals.net> wrote:
> Ciprian Dorin Craciun <ciprian.craciun at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 11:11 AM, Frank Bonnet <f.bonnet at esiee.fr> wrote:
>>> Hello
>>>
>>> I'm searching for a "cloud software" :-)
>>>
>>> More precisely we would like to offer to our students and professors
>>> a kind of private cloud to access/manipulate  their personnal data
>>> from almost anywhere and with almost any devices ...
>>> ( Personnal PC, Mac, smartphones   and tablets ... etc )
>>>
>>> Anyone could help ?
>>> Thank you
>>
>>
>>     Although it's not "cloud"-labeled, and:
>>     * if you're interested only in data (as in files) management;
>>     * and you want to host it your self;
>>     , you could take a look over OpenAFS. It's quite nice, works over
>> WAN, supported on most modern OS's, and has strong authentication and
>> authorization. (I don't know about Smartphones, tablets, etc.)
>>
>>     Ciprian.
>
> Hmm that sounds interesting. Do you know how persistent the local cache
> is? If I do something like: open some (large) remote file (hence the
> large file is transferred to the client), reboot the client, and reopen
> the large file again. Is the large file then transferred again?
> (assuming no other clients changed the file in the mean time). The
> website is not particularly specific about the caching policy. If the
> file is only transferred once it could be useful to sorta kinda fake
> something like dropbox.
>
> Regards,


    I'm not very OpenAFS knowing, I only use it for myself and my
family, but I would guess that a persistent cache would survive a
reboot. I've also seen something on their mailing list regarding an
"offline" mode (maybe it was called "detached" mode)?

    I strongly advise you to take it into consideration as it was made
for such purposes and has great support for things like quota,
multiple file servers, replication, etc. (It is also used by some
large financial companies, maybe JP Morgan?, see their "use cases"
page, but certainly universities are enlisted there, so is CERN.)

    Ciprian.