Re: Going forward on replication-migration

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From: Robert Thurlow (Robert.Thurlow@eng.sun.com)
Date: 12/20/02-04:53:49 PM Z


Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2002 15:53:49 -0700 (MST)
From: Robert Thurlow <Robert.Thurlow@eng.sun.com>
Subject: Re: Going forward on replication-migration
Message-ID: <Roam.SIMC.2.0.6.1040424829.20037.thurlow@jurassic.eng>

> The problem with the cthon '03 prototyping goal is that it has
> become prototyping-for-prototyping's sake.

Almost.  My goals were to show up with some code that I would
promise to throw away, and to have learned more by the effort.
In parallel, and perhaps as important, would be to prove that
we have or do not have critical mass on this work, and to try
to show that to the vendors who have either been inactive or
actively hostile to it.  I really want to either prove we can
make progress on this or pack up this work item and go find
something else to work on.

> The purpose of 
> prototyping is to do some implementation to learn things about
> the protocol, when just thinking about it and making comments,
> no longer helps.  Clearly, we aren't at that stage, yet.  

I would agree.

> We need to get serious.  Even though I think that the goal of 
> prototyping at cthon '03 is no longer realistic, I do believe
> we need to have some goals to force the pace.  I think it is 
> reasonable to have a goal of a prototypable protocol by cthon 
> '03. That is an ambitious goal, but if we work hard we could
> reach it.  Let's have a meeting at cthon '03 to assess progress
> toward that goal and plan the next steps (i.e. getting some
> prototypes and testing them).

This is probably a lot more valuable that attempting to keep a
goal of testing a prototype there.  I haven't added up the work
required to recast the strawman into an RPC-based protocol and
make it at least somewhat implementable - that was deliberate,
as my Christmas break starts tomorrow.  But it's clear that a
lot of the thinking I did wasn't carried far enough, and that
fixing that isn't trivial.

> One suggestion I have is that maybe we need to
> create a separate nfsv4-wg-mig-rep list.

That could be useful.  Should it be separate, or include the
current nfsv4-wg as a member so messages still go to all who
see it now?  How do other working groups manage this?

> One other issue on the migration-replication front is that we have
> not done testing (that I know of) on the client-server aspects of
> this that are already in the about-to-be-a-proposed-standard v4
> protocol.  Cthon '03 seems like an excellent place to test those.

I'm in favor of that, and would expect we could code hacks to
do some of that testing.

> One other thought is that e-mail is not the best method for some
> of the discussions we are having (for/against RPC is a definite 
> example).  Maybe a conference call to discuss things would help.  
> Is there any interest in scheduling one sometime in the first half 
> of January, as a way of discussing some of the troublesome issues, 
> and focusing effort on getting some momentum for this protocol? 

Certainly.  I'd be happy to host a design team meeting in that
timeframe, and apologize for not having used this more after
the strawman was submitted.

Rob T


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