“Yes Grasshopper, there are tools to ease the toil of
administering large-scale filesystems. So many demands: ease of
use, stability, speed, flexibility, mobile users, security, and all
too often last on the list, ease of administration. AFS meets all
of these goals.“AFS stands for Andrew File System. It was originally developed
at Carnegie-Mellon University in the early 1980’s, to meet the
needs of serving many different departments, students, and faculty.
It was named to honor the university’s founder. The Transarc Corp.
marketed it, then IBM bought Transarc in 1994. In 2000 IBM forked
the code, releasing a free version, OpenAFS, and continues to sell
and support their own commercial version. Both versions are
actively maintained. IBM contributes to, but does not control or
provide technical support for OpenAFS. (Officially, it is now
simply AFS, not Andrew File System.)“OpenAFS is released under the CPL, IBM’s Common Public License,
formerly the IPL, IBM Public License. The CPL is an Open Source
Initiative-compatible license, but is not GPL compatible…”