Linux System Administration

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Chapter 8: Local Network Services

Distributed Filesystems

You may find it difficult to imagine a time when PCs simply stood alone without the

benefit of a network or a connection to the Internet. But PCs were not originally

designed with networking in mind. You may or may not remember when people

transferred files by walking floppy disks from one PC to another, or flipped a switch

so two to four users could share a printer. Those were painful times.

After the introduction of the PC, it took a number of years and innovations to cre-

ate such basic networking conveniences as distributed filesystems. Getting those

filesystems working on PCs transformed the landscape of business, because it

allowed us to put a computer on everyone’s desk. No longer did we have to manu-

ally fill out forms for keypunch operators to funnel into batch mainframe systems.

Networking became more available and affordable when an IBM researcher, Barry

Feigenbaum, turned a local DOS filesystem into a distributed one. His efforts helped

create the Server Message Block (SMB) application protocol, and the era of system

administrators and network engineers began.

Distributed filesystems let users open, read, and write files stored on computers

other than their own. In some environments, a single large computer stores files

accessed by all users on the LAN; the central computer can even store the users’

home directories, so