On Fri, Aug 30, 2002 at 01:14:05PM -0400, Sean Finney wrote:
> hi all--
> 
> i'm looking into setting up a file server for what right now is a
> primarily solaris and linux computer lab.  we purchased a disk
> array and an smp x86 server, and had it up and running (debian)
> before somebody realized that we had forgotten about the issue of
> acl's, or more importantly the lack thereof in ext2 and the linux
> kernel in general.  also, from what i've read, linux doesn't support

Your two best bets are:

1) Solaris 8 (you'll need many patches.  You'll need to enable metadata
   logging on the filesystems to get good performance.)

2) Linux with XFS and all of the latest NFS patches (these are not
   really integrated into the 2.4.xx kernels in a timely manner, and
   you *do* want them).

Solaris is a much better choice.  You'll pay $50 or something for the
Solaris 8 CDs, and you'll have to live with the fact that it'll be a
while until you can have Solaris 9.  But you'll get far, far better
NFS server performance and probably an overall more stable system.  You
will also need all the security patches to Solaris 8 -- quite a few,
at this point.

The way to get an appropriate Linux version installed is to install
Mandrake, SUSE, or one of the other distributions that come with
XFS (*NOT* RedHat), then upgrade using the XFS kernel patches from
SGI for the latest 2.4.x kernel.  You should be able to get both the
XFS and NFS patch sets in with minimal trouble.  XFS has native ACL
support.  You'd want to confirm that it works well across NFS, however.

Thor