[HCoop-Discuss] Reorganizing, people-wise and tech-wise

[Adam Chlipala]

Matthias-Christian Ott wrote:
>
>>> I vote against separate machines, my experience at TIP9UG showed that
>>> it's quite valuable to have a shared filesystem.
>>>   
>>>       
>> Can you elaborate on this?
>>     
>
> They have a single fileserver which store all the data and you can
> simple log into any of the diskless servers and find the same
> environment. These servers just provide CPU power and the filesystem
> server provides the storage.
>
> You could load balance, do cloud computing (like Google App Engine or so),
> and you don't have a single point of failure, so if one server goes down
> (except the fileserver), the members can simply use one of the others.
> Moreover, new services don't have to be distributed to the server (like
> http, smtp, imap or pop), because they operate on the same set of data,
> this saves a lot of administration work and is more flexible. You could
> simply PnP new servers.
>   

It would be simple enough to let people opt into a variety of shared 
filesystems.  I think most members would be glad for the chance to avoid 
opting in, but we could still make it easy to access networked storage 
from any machine.  Setting up the common daemons on a new machine should 
be simple enough as to be an irrelevant cost, given the rate at which I 
expect we'd add new member servers.  Maintaining them shouldn't be much 
work, either.  It wasn't back when we had a single server.

What do you think about this scenario?