pNFS server Plan B

[Jordan Hubbard]

OK, wow.  This appears to have turned into something of a referendum on NFS and, just based on Rick and Doug’s defense of pNFS, I also think my commentary on that may have been misconstrued somewhat.

So, let me just set the record straight by saying that I’m all in favor of pNFS.  It addresses a very definite need in the Enterprise marketplace and gives FreeBSD yet another arrow in its quiver when it comes to being “a player” in that (ever-growing) arena.  The only point I was trying to make before was that if we could ALSO address clustering in a more general way as part of providing a pNFS solution, that would be great.   I am not, however, the one writing the code and if my comments were in any way discouraging to the folks that are, I apologize and want to express my enthusiasm for it.  If iXsystems engineering resources can contribute in any way to moving this ball forward, let me know and we’ll start doing so.

On the more general point of “NFS is hard, let’s go shopping” let me also say that it’s kind of important not to conflate end-user targeted solutions with enterprise solutions.  Setting up a Kerberized NFSv4, for example, is not really designed to be trivial to set up and if anyone is waiting for that to happen, they may be waiting a very long time (like, forever).  NFS and SMB are both fairly simple technologies to use if you restrict yourself to using, say, just 20% of their overall feature-sets.  Once you add ACLs, Directory Services, user/group and permissions mappings, and any of the other more enterprise-centric features of these filesharing technologies, however, things rapidly get more complicated and the DevOps people who routinely play in these kinds of environments are quite happy to have all those options available because they’re not consumers operating in consumer environments.  

Sun didn’t design NFS to be particularly consumer-centric, for that matter, and if you think SMB is “simple” because you clicked Network on Windows Explorer one day and stuff just automagically appeared, you should try operating it in a serious Windows Enterprise environment (just flip through some of the SMB bugs in the FreeNAS bug tracker - https://bugs.freenas.org/projects/freenas/issues?utf8=✓&set_filter=1&f%5B%5D=status_id&op%5Bstatus_id%5D=*&f%5B%5D=category_id&op%5Bcategory_id%5D=%3D&v%5Bcategory_id%5D%5B%5D=57&f%5B%5D=&c%5B%5D=tracker&c%5B%5D=status&c%5B%5D=priority&c%5B%5D=subject&c%5B%5D=assigned_to&c%5B%5D=updated_on&c%5B%5D=fixed_version&group_by= - if you want to see the kinds of problems users wrestle with all the time).

Anyway, I’ll get off the soapbox now, I just wanted to dispute the premise that “simple file sharing” that is also “secure file sharing” and “flexible file sharing” doesn’t really exist.  The simplest end-user oriented file sharing system I’ve used to date is probably AFP, and Apple has been trying to kill it for years, probably because it doesn’t have all those extra knobs and Kerberos / Directory Services integration business users have been asking for (it’s also not particularly industry standard).

- Jordan