"The ability to share disks, directories, and files over a
network is one of the most significant advances in modern
computing, reducing local disk space requirements and making it
easy for users to collaborate without ending up with hundreds of
versions of the same files. Personal computers running Microsoft
Windows and Apple's MacOS and Mac OS X inherently support sharing
disks and directories with other systems of the same types. Linux
and Unix systems traditionally use the NFS network filesystem in
order to do the same sort of thing.
"NFS is the best-known network file-sharing mechanism for Unix,
Linux, and related operating systems because it is included in most
Unix-like operating system distributions and is trivial to
configure. NFS is supported in the Linux kernel and NFS-related
utilities are provided with every Linux distribution. However, a
number of more modern mechanisms for sharing files and directories
over networks are available for today's Linux systems. Each of
these can provide significant administrative and usability
advantages for sites running Linux.
"Distributed filesystems such as OpenAFS are Open Source
releases of distributed filesystems that have been in commercial
use for over a decade (AFS). Support for network-oriented
filesystems such as InterMezzo and Coda (http://coda.cs.cmu.edu) is
already integrated into later 2.4 Linux kernels. New, web-based
file-sharing mechanisms such as WebDAV are easily integrated into
existing Web-oriented environments, and can be mounted as though
they were filesystems. The expanding dependence on networking as a
basic tenet of computing today will only help popularize these
newer, more powerful file-sharing mechanisms..."
