WAFS, NFS Proxy & NFSv4 ?

[Mohammad Bhuyan]

Hi All,

I am involved in a project where we are to develop/deploy a WAFS
solution to make large amount of research data (many large files)
available to user groups spread geographically over a WAN (regular
thin links).

We want to make the data storage available to clients so that their
application can run local to them with POSIX API access to the
data/files depot. As we have a Data Centre approach,
distributed/parallel file system is not our option (Don't want to
impose major changes to client infrastructure).  Also something like
GFarm is not considered due to
deployment/administration/interoperability issues.

In short I am mainly looking towards NFS type solution but given to
our WAFS needs I am opting for something along the line of Nache (NFS
with proxy capability) with a bit of data awareness (intelligent
caching) pluggable to it.

I am writing this to reflect the idea form you. Also with some
NFSv4 questions.

1. "Standard" is one of the key requirement for any solution we
adopt/develop. I have seen the RFC 2624 talking about addressing the
need of proxy servers. But couldn't find out anything related to that
in RFC 3530. Does the NFSv4 standard accommodates the proxying &
caching (@proxy) capability? How?

2. While trying to understand the NFSv4 security I am a bit lost. For
example how RPCSEC_GSS and Kerberos related? Pointers to good
explanation/tutorial appreciated.

Also the solution that I am thinking is not THE decided solution.
Please advise if there is something I should look at.

--
Mohammad Bhuyan
Software Engineer (R&D)
Centre for Neuroscience, University of Melbourne, Australia
SGI, Australia
Mobile: +61 4 13324850
mahafuz at gmail.com