Elliot,

I feel terrible that I haven't kept people up to date.  There is a lot of
news, let me give you a summary.

Achiemenents:
=============
- port to 2.1.?? very far along. It works.
- we found one very subtle but crucial bug in the 2.0.30 Coda kernel code: 
when this was fixed, Linux Coda became really pretty solid. 
- servers have a new inode & partition scheme which can handle servers up
to about 8GB on Linux. Further scalability issues are now understood but
will not be implemented for another year or so. 
- backup system was ported from Mach to Linux and NetBSD and appears to
work.  Support for spooling and multilevel (>2) is in the making.
- many complicated server bugs were fixed, many sysad scripts were redone
- we stopped supporting Mach and are now 50/50 on Linux and NetBSD.  We
have all but switched off all the Mach machines.
- we did a bit of work on Windows NT
- Michael Callahan did a lot of work on Windows 95
- Elliot Lee with some help from us ported to Sparc Linux
- Lily and I designed and Lily partly implemented write back caching.
- We have detailed plan to incorporate kerberos.
- We have converted a large portion of our documentation to SGML
(linuxdoc).  I'll put it on the WWW real soon. 

Setbacks:
=========
- the weakly connected stuff isn't working really well yet
- there are thread locking bugs in the client that make the most recent
Venus not so very good. These were unfortunately triggered more often
after we fixed other bugs...
- the backup system (which is OLD) requires some design changes since
currently one needs lots of tapes and a large backup machine. 
- Lily Mummert moved on, our secretary left us, Josh Raiff, our "sysad"
programmer left us.  We now have Henry Pierce and a new secretary as our
systems manager.

Plans:
======
- fix Linux 2.1 stuff so that it is stable by the time 2.2 appears
- fix the locking problems in Venus
- fix the backup system. 

At this point we should have good (not perfect, but good) Coda for
strongly connected (ethernet) installations.  Hopefully we can find at
least one site that is interested in trying to use it seriously.  We are
willing to help.

- fix the weak connection stuff
- fix some further bugs we know about
- finish the ports which are in progress (NT, 95, maybe Linux AXP). 
- scalability and performance.

If a good person comes along we would be interested in hiring another
programmer for Coda.

I should make some new releases, I feel a bit guilty about leaving the
lists so quiet, but I just felt that the issues of quality need to be
addressed with the highest priority.

- Peter -





On Wed, 3 Dec 1997, Elliot Lee wrote:

> I noticed that the client kernel code was included in Linux 2.1.70. Any
> news on other fronts for Coda?
> 
> Thanks,
> -- Elliot
>