Ori: Another Open-Source Distributed File-System

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ori: Another Open-Source Distributed File-System

Ori is a secure distributed file-system under development for Linux and BSD operating systems along with OS X...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTg4NTM

[schmidtbag]

I don't understand - why is a filesystem needed for this? Seems completely unnecessary but maybe I'm not understanding something.

[gens]

I don't understand - why is a filesystem needed for this? Seems completely unnecessary but maybe I'm not understanding something.

what do you mean by why ?
if you mean that it can be done by rsync, then know that this gives more control and a history to rollback to
from what i see, that is

the paper looks like an interesting read

http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/2530000/2522721/p151-mashtizadeh.pdf

at first glance it looks similar to plan9's fossil file system

[jake_lesser]

I don't understand - why is a filesystem needed for this? Seems completely unnecessary but maybe I'm not understanding something.

What you need to be asking is - why is there a FreeBSD and Mac OSX port? The developers need to get they priorities straight. OSX is dying, BSD is dead. All new software projects should focus on Linux.

[rikkinho]

hm

Let me be first to say (if at least in this thread)

HALLOWED ARE THE ORI
HALLOWED ARE THE CHILDREN OF THE ORI
HALLOWED ARE THOSE WHO WALK IN UNISON

lol

indeed

[rohcQaH]

HALLOWED ARE THE ORI
HALLOWED ARE THE CHILDREN OF THE ORI
HALLOWED ARE THOSE WHO WALK IN UNISON

Funny enough, unison is the name of an awesome bidirectional file synchronizer.

what do you mean by why ?
if you mean that it can be done by rsync, then know that this gives more control and a history to rollback to from what i see, that is

rsync is only useful for synchronization when you have a "master" copy and a "clone".

The often cited use case is a set of work data on your workstation, and you need to access it from your laptop while traveling or from home.
Mounting a remote filesystem is easy. But that requires network connectivity and may be slow.
Distributed filesystems with smart caching and offline modes are still easy. When you reconnect, changes are propagated and all is well.

What I haven't seen in any distributed filesystem (or actually, in any solution except unison) is proper conflict resolution. For some reason, some file got changed on both my workstation AND my laptop. What to do? That's a complicated problem, and "silently overwrite one" is not the answer - despite the fact that many distributed filesystems do just that.

Unison will just show all changes and ask you to confirm before proceeding. For conflicts, it will do nothing unless you specify what to do. But unison only works when I manually start the program to initialize a synchronization before I take the laptop offline and after it reconnects.

A proper distributed filesystem with actual conflict resolution and a history sounds very attractive. Not going to trust my important data to an experimental file system just yet, but I'll keep an eye on it.

[csslayer]

One of my friend had a course project on this fs. As far as I know, its stabilty is still far from good. It's still very easy to crash the fuse daemon and make the fs fall into a unrecoverable state.

[kpedersen]

What you need to be asking is - why is there a FreeBSD and Mac OSX port? The developers need to get they priorities straight. OSX is dying, BSD is dead. All new software projects should focus on Linux.

Stanford is very much an OSX / BSD research house. It must pain you to know that without the FreeBSD and Mac OS X versions, there would be no Linux port haha.

Thats the problem with Linux plebs... They dont realize that Linux remains an after-thought from actual "non-toy" operating systems.

[david_lynch]

Stanford is very much an OSX / BSD research house. It must pain you to know that without the FreeBSD and Mac OS X versions, there would be no Linux port haha.

Thats the problem with Linux plebs... They dont realize that Linux remains an after-thought from actual "non-toy" operating systems.

LOL - "non-toy" operating systems. That's hilarious. Almost as hilarious as all the OSX and BSD systems on the top 500 supercomputer list. Oh wait - damn! There are none.

[kpedersen]

LOL - "non-toy" operating systems. That's hilarious. Almost as hilarious as all the OSX and BSD systems on the top 500 supercomputer list. Oh wait - damn! There are none.

Super computers these days *are* toys, (albeit rather big ones)
Or they sometimes act as publicity stunts where the OS is largely ignored anyway haha.

Something in practice like Netflix with a large, complex and performant architecture (and happens to run FreeBSD) is so much more impressive then gluing a bunch of IBM blades together and calling it "super"