Intermezzo has failed. We have no hope.

The news is always late: Linux needs better network File Systems. This is something that has been discussed only for about the last 5 years, now, but it's good to see the ever-timely NewsForge getting on-board just as the ship sailed.

I guess some folks, those who still live under rocks but actually edit a file on a shared volume, these people would find this to be news.

I mean, the state of Networked FileSystems is pathetic. The Internet, increasingly built and maintained by the lowest bidder and becoming no more in some folks' minds than a nifty channel to choke with fucking adverts, this internet just isn't reliable.

Having suffered a significant outage myself, weekly in the last month, I think my Cable company really believes that the Internet is not a service but more, really, a luxury item that we only use for fucking entertainment rather than as a tool and work medium

Unfortunately, we have little hope:

• Coda is prohibitively hard to install, and, when I tried, I found it wonderfully undocumented. Think of the rich challenge I could have enjoyed, if I only didn't need to do anything else for the next month except for getting this thing set up.
• InterMezzo, a coda-lite, is a dead project. The only people that don't think so are the people still downloading it. One guy maintains it, and that's only when he's not doing work for
• Lustre, the great third-generation product. Replicates, does it? Say, what version of perl does it use to toss journalled data over to the web server on the other end? And you want me to rely on this hokey method, right?

Our last, best hope:

• Radiant Systems has this peerfs thing that, they claim, is a replicated, journalled filesystem that permits true peered replication among N peers and which suffers disconnection gracefully.
  

Unfortunately, I've been once-bitten a few times, and now I'm twice-shy. I'll believe the hype when their Sales Support Engineer calls me tomorrow.

Yeah, the poor guy tomorrow. It's obvious, from my conversation with their sales guy, that they think I've got a spare bucket of money to toss at this. Guys, I'm running white box; I don't even pay for my linux distro, and this is a hobby project with me and two other guys. Where the hell're we gonna get a whack of money to throw at this thing? At least they got back to me..

.. two weeks after I originally mailed them.

I guess we'll see, though.