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