SEMiSLUG Notes

0 December 2005

Question & Answer Sessions

0. Where's Becki?

Elsewhere. Learn to deal with this.

1. Who wants to be on a panel at Penguicon?

Contact mlowsley@aol.com if you're interested.

Looking for non-religious views on what's the best distro for a Linux novice? (Cheap distros, specificly.)

2. Any experience with VMware?

"VSX is quite neat, really." -- Chris Polk

He's impressed, which isn't easy. This is a good fit for places that are hosting machines that spend most of their time idle; consolidate, 'em on one VMware box.

This would be a good subject for a future presentation; we should see if anyone is interested in coming to do this.

4. Any Xandros experience out there?

Doesn't sound like it.

8. Suggestions for an off-line wiki editor?

Nothing definite.

See http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PersonalWiki for some ideas.

10. < > in HTML?

That's &lt; and &gt; to you and me. sed or ascii2html should do the trick.

l. iPod shuttle?

One of Chris's coworkers has one and loves it.

3. Has anyone used Mailman with private archives?

See R&I for more info.

5. Got an IP tunneling stories?

For moron users? Uh ... nope.

7. Why is there a question '1' and a question 'l'?

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

9. Cisco router (possibly firewall) fails to pass certain files -- any guesses as to what's up with that?

Nothing definite. It could just be "one of those things."

"It sounds like a window mismatch issue." -- M.R. Wayne


Presentation



  "NFSv4 News and Views" with Dr. Peter Honeyman


  Brief History of NFVv4
  --------------------------------------------

    v4 adds things naming and security to NFS

    It tosses the mount protocol in favor of security at a much lower
    layer.

    Security
    --------------------------------------------
    RPCSEC_GSS: GSS security flavor for ONC/RPC
        Mandatory mechanisms:  K5, LIPKEY
    ACLs
        no mount protocol

    Locking and delegation
    --------------------------------------------
    Lease-based mandatory byte-range locks
    CIFS-like "shares"
        Deny bits on open
    Delegation, modeled after "op locks", grants control to client
        Never mandatory to offer or accept
        Delegation is offered in response to open
        Makes locks fast, reduces network traffic
        Callback path

    Minor version numbers
    --------------------------------------------
    Regular (annual?) extension mechanism
    NFSv4.1 will have neat stuff in it -- stay tuned


    Compound RPC
    --------------------------------------------
    IMHO mostly to clean up the protocol spec
        Tacit GETATTR is now an explicit optimization
    Possibly other optimizations
        At mount time
        On first access


  NFVv4 features
  --------------------------------------------

    Name space, migration, replication
    --------------------------------------------
    /nfs/citi.umich.edu/user/honey/
        Use DNS to find NFS server(s)
        mount one
    Extend FS_LOCATIONS to directories
    Lazy primary server for replication

    Migration
    --------------------------------------------
    Is a special case of replication ... I guess ... isn't it?
    Wanted, dead or alive:  administrative clue

    Parallel access
    --------------------------------------------

        Cluster File System
        --------------------------------------------
        Every node is a fully capable client, data server, and metadata server
        Examples:  IBM GPFS, Redhat GFS, Polyserve Matrix Server


        Parallel file systems
        --------------------------------------------
        Clietns access storage directly
        Separate metadata server(s)
        Object Based: Lustre, Panasas ActiveScale
        Block Baed: EMC High Road, IBM SAN FS


        NFS and  HPC File Systems
        --------------------------------------------
        Single server bottle neck
        Extra level of indirection

        pNFS
        --------------------------------------------
        [nice diagrams]


    RDMA (Remote DMA)
    --------------------------------------------
    Direct I/O -- true zero copy
    "Chunks direct data transfer between client memory and server buffers
    ONC/RPC over RDMA
        New transport type and frame
        Bindings for NFSv2/v3/v4


    GridNFS
        NFSv4 and the Grid are simultaneously poised for exponential
        growth in influence. . . .
    --------------------------------------------

    Directory delegation
    --------------------------------------------


  NFVv4 futures
  --------------------------------------------




Rumor & Innuendo (No names, please)

Mailman is used on a surprising number of security mailing lists. The archive security is kind of compromised and has been for some time.

Comcast has started to block outbound port 25.


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