Home | History | Annotate | Line # | Download | only in coda
README revision 1.1 
      1                 Announcing the Availability of the
      2                         Coda Distributed
      3                            Filesystem
      4                               for
      5                          BSD Unix Systems
      6 
      7         Coda is a distributed file system like NFS and AFS.  It is
      8 freely available, like NFS.  But it functions much like AFS in being a
      9 "stateful" file system.  Coda and AFS cache files on your local
     10 machine to improve performance.  But Coda goes a step further than AFS
     11 by letting you access the cached files when there is no available
     12 network, viz. disconnected laptops and network outages.  In Coda, both
     13 the client and server are outside the kernel which makes them easier
     14 to experiment with.
     15 
     16 To get more information on Coda, I would like to refer people to
     17         http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu
     18 There is a wealth of documents, papers, theses there.  There is also a
     19 good introduction to the Coda File System in
     20         http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/ljpaper/lj.html
     21 
     22 Coda was originally developed as an academic prototype/testbed.  It is
     23 being polished and rewritten where necessary.  Coda is a work in
     24 progress and does have bugs.  It is, though, very usable.  Our
     25 interest is in making Coda available to as many people as possible and
     26 to have Coda evolve and flourish.
     27 
     28 The bulk of the Coda file system code supports the Coda client
     29 program, the Coda server program and the utilities needed by both.
     30 All these programs are unix programs and can run equally well on any
     31 Unix platform.  Our main development thrust is improving these
     32 programs.  There is a small part of Coda that deals with the kernel to
     33 file system interface.  This code is OS specific (but should not be
     34 platform specific).
     35 
     36 Coda is currently available for several OS's and platforms:
     37         Freebsd-2.2.5: i386
     38         Freebsd-2.2.6: i386
     39 	Freebsd -current: i386
     40         linux 2.0: i386 & sparc
     41         linux 2.1: i386 & sparc
     42         NetBSD 1.3: i386
     43 	NetBSD -current: i386
     44 The relevant sources, binaries, and docs can be found in
     45         ftp://ftp.coda.cs.cmu.edu/pub/coda/
     46 
     47 We intend to come out with new Coda releases often, not daily.  We
     48 don't wish to slight any OS/platform not mentioned above.  We are just
     49 limited in our resources as to what we can support internally.  We
     50 will be happy to integrate OpenBSD support as well as other OS
     51 support.  Also, adding platform support is relatively easy and we can
     52 discuss this.  The only problem is that Coda has a light weight
     53 process package.  It does some manipulations in assembler which would
     54 have to be redone for a different platform.
     55 
     56 There are several mailing lists @coda.cs.cmu.edu that discuss coda:
     57 coda-announce and linux-coda.  We are going to revise linux-coda to be
     58 OS neutral, since it is mainly Coda we want to discuss.  We appreciate
     59 comments, feedback, bug reports, bug fixes, enhancements, etc.
     60 
     61