News

[Luca D. <luk...@us...>]

Hi everybody

There are not so many subscribers yet in this mailing
list, and what is worst, GMail users are having troubles
posting to it.

Anyway, I'm writing down some notes and news about the
project, for those who read.

There are some people who are showing interest in the
aim of the "massix" project.
One also spontaneously stated his availability to help
in building the web site.

There are also people who wrote to me to advise about
various kind of problems and to give hints.



Rainer Peter wrote to me about possible authentication problems.

That is, if we use NFS for sharing parts of the filesystem it could be a risk.
He says:
>nfs just handles uid/guid O.K. also acl ... but I am not sure if you
>could really trust in this, since when you have physical access to the
>network of the nfs client, you could become the nfs client.
>so nfs is and will be inseure.

I was reading in wikipedia article about NFS these lines:
>Version 4 (RFC 3010, December 2000; revised in RFC 3530,
> April 2003), influenced by AFS and CIFS, includes performance
> improvements, mandates strong security, and introduces a stateful
> protocol. Version 4 was the first version developed with the Internet
> Engineering Task Force (IETF) after Sun Microsystems handed over
> the development of the NFS protocols.

A document (howto) in the nfs.sourceforge site states that in recent
linux kernels the version 3 of NFS is stable and version 4 is under
development and unstable.

I think it would be fine in our project to begin using NFS, cause when
we will have some result the NFS version 4 will be probably supported
by linux kernels.



Someone also pointed out other similar projects, but they are
focusing on clustering solutions. E.g. openMosix
Our project aims at a very different (and easier) goal.
I hope that the brief description in the web site is suitable
to explain what our intention is for now.



We do need to prepare a sort of roadmap, just to say at any
moment what is the next important thing to do.

At the moment, that's all, folks!


--Luca