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Announcing the Availability of the Coda Distributed Filesystem for BSD Unix Systems Coda is a distributed file system like NFS and AFS. It is freely available, like NFS. But it functions much like AFS in being a "stateful" file system. Coda and AFS cache files on your local machine to improve performance. But Coda goes a step further than AFS by letting you access the cached files when there is no available network, viz. disconnected laptops and network outages. In Coda, both the client and server are outside the kernel which makes them easier to experiment with. To get more information on Coda, I would like to refer people to http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu There is a wealth of documents, papers, and theses there. There is also a good introduction to the Coda File System in http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/ljpaper/lj.html Coda was originally developed as an academic prototype/testbed. It is being polished and rewritten where necessary. Coda is a work in progress and does have bugs. It is, though, very usable. Our interest is in making Coda available to as many people as possible and to have Coda evolve and flourish. The bulk of the Coda file system code supports the Coda client program, the Coda server program and the utilities needed by both. All these programs are unix programs and can run equally well on any Unix platform. Our main development thrust is improving these programs. There is a small part of Coda that deals with the kernel to file system interface. This code is OS specific (but should not be platform specific). Coda is currently available for several OS's and platforms: Freebsd-2.2.5: i386 Freebsd-2.2.6: i386 Freebsd -current: i386 linux 2.0: i386 & sparc linux 2.1: i386 & sparc NetBSD 1.3: i386 NetBSD -current: i386 The relevant sources, binaries, and docs can be found in ftp://ftp.coda.cs.cmu.edu/pub/coda/ We intend to come out with new Coda releases often, not daily. We don't want to slight any OS/platform not mentioned above. We are just limited in our resources as to what we can support internally. We will be happy to integrate OpenBSD support as well as other OS support. Also, adding platform support should be relatively easy and we can discuss this. The only difficulty is that Coda has a light weight process package. It does some manipulations in assembler which would have to be redone for a different platform. There are several mailing lists @coda.cs.cmu.edu that discuss coda: coda-announce and linux-coda. We are going to revise linux-coda to be OS neutral, since it is mainly Coda we want to discuss. We appreciate comments, feedback, bug reports, bug fixes, enhancements, etc.