🚀 go-pugleaf

* Trevor Best wrote:
> In NT you can stitch together several disks into one using either volume
> striping or RAID-0 striping. Partitiion Magic seems to be able to do the
> same thing and make this transparent to the OS, this is rather a permanent
> step compared to mounting volumes under unix. The unix mount points are such
> because there's no concept of separate disks/volumes, just one large
> one.

But this is absolutely irrelevant.  Quite apart from the fact that
any serious Unix can do RAID, it just doesn't solve the problem.

The problem is that I have, say 20 fileservers and 400 workstations.
And I want the users of the system to see a filespace which
corresponds to *their* needs, and never to have to know which bits
come from which fileserver.  I also want this setup to be centrally
managed, and ideally I want to be able to change associations on the
fly. I want people to see names like /project/clim/work and /home/tfb,
and *not* //fs11/clim/work and //fs09/tfb.  The nerest that you seem
to be able to get to this in windows is centrally maintaining a bunch
of `mounts' (whatever it calls it) so you have a global association of
logical places with drive letters -- your home dir is always `H:' or
whatever.  So you can get maybe 22 possible locations with basically
random names.  Ick.

VMS incidentally had logical names to deal wit this kind of thing.
VMS was a lot more sophisticated than Windows seems to be...

--tim