linux as a workstation

Edward Glowacki glowack2@msu.edu
Wed, 15 Aug 2001 11:31:52 -0400


Quoted from Scott Overfield on Wed, Aug 15, 2001 at 10:44:28AM -0400:
> Good Morning,
> I have been asked to give a presentation at an upcoming meeting on the
> viability of linux as a workstation/desktop OS.....could anyone on the list
> point me toward any resources? Also, are there any alternatives to NFS for
> network file sharing between linux/unix servers and linux/unix workstations?
> Any help appreciated....

NFS Alternatives:

AFS (http://www.openafs.org)
CODA (http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/)

Basically AFS was developed at Carnegie Mellon University, and
eventually was released as a commercial product which is now owned
by IBM.  IBM released the source code to it (forked it really,
keeping their own closed-source version), which spawned the OpenAFS
project.  Meanwhile, CMU seems to have continued working on the
system and now there's CODA, which has "its origin in AFS2."  So
really AFS, OpenAFS, and CODA are all pretty much in the same
family, though I won't risk stepping on toes by calling them
"similar" because I really don't know close they are. ;)

I've been hoping for something a bit easier to use than these, I
guess maybe something like an SSL/SSH (encryption and authentication)
system something akin to (don't shoot me for saying this!) MS
Windows file sharing.  That is, you choose a directory to export,
you give it some permissions/passwords, and then you can access it
remotely.  Personally I think SSH kinda does the right thing as
far as authentication goes, since you can do password and/or
public-private key pairs,  You'd need the ability to mount without
a password so you can do it at boot time without user interaction.
Personally, I like setting up SSH so I can login from trusted
workstations to servers without typing in my password every time
by using DSA keys, makes sysadmin duties a LOT easier (so long as
my workstation remains secure!!![1]).

So I guess the answer is, there isn't really anything good I've
found.  NFS has security problems, it's slow[2], and there are
strict limitations to how much you can export in terms of different
directories with different permissions.  AFS and CODA are probably
good for large sites where you can have the correct hardware and
personel to run it, but for a small setup, it's probably overkill.

Of course, you could try things like running NFS over SSH or something,
and there might be filesystem options I haven't discovered yet, but
I'm not holding my breath.

[1] I generally only have minimal services running with open sockets
to the internet, and I run a firewall in addition to that.  I can't
*guarantee* that will keep me secure, but I don't lose sleep worrying
over my workstation being broken into because I feel it's "secure
enough".

[2] I've timed NFS vs SSH, and even with the CPU overhead of
encrypting all the data, SSH was noticably faster... ;)

-- 
Edward Glowacki			glowack2@msu.edu
Michigan State University	
"...a partial solution to the right problem is better than a complete
solution to the wrong one." (http://uiweb.com/issues/issue14.htm)