eHelpWe do. It's known informally as DFS.
DFS was one part of the computing infrastructure project known informally as "the Intranet". The Intranet was originally developed in the 1990s: it combined file sharing and storage, web service, email, identity management, authentication and authorization, and other services into one single, campus-wide system. Unfortunately, the Intranet did not age particularly well: the hardware it runs on is outdated, and much of its software is old and unsupported. I&IT has slowly been replacing parts of the Intranet with newer, faster solutions since 2004: DFS is the last major system to be replaced.
Though DFS nominally succeeds in providing users a safe, reliable place to store files, it is outdated. Users of our storage backend want more space (the default storage quota on DFS is 50 megabytes; not very much in 2009) and more robust access controls, while the people in I&IT who maintain it would like to move to a system that is more widely supported and current than DFS. Our ZFS system solves these problems.
ZFS is the informal name for our new storage backend. (We call it ZFS because it is based on the ZFS file system)
ZFS addresses the shortcomings of DFS. Among other benefits:
The new backend also introduces some new features.
In DFS, all your files were accessible through the web, which meant that you had to be especially careful with permissions to keep the world from seeing private files. In ZFS, there is a separate directory for web files (files served through http://www.csupomona.edu/~yourbronconame/) to keep them separate from private files (which aren't served on the web, but are still accessible to you through other means). This will make it easier to publish web pages: instead of having to mangle the access controls for the files that make up your website, you can simply stick them in the /www folder, and they'll appear on the web. This also makes it easier to avoid uninentionally serving content to the web -- no matter what access controls a file has, it will never be served by the Cal Poly Pomona webserver unless it is in /www.
ZFS also has user-accessible archives—snapshots of your ZFS space at a particular point in time, taken automatically. These are different from the behind-the-scenes backups that happen with ZFS (and happened with DFS), because you can access them. If you accidentally delete a file, or get really mad at your CS256 project and shred -u it at 3 am the night before it is due after working on it for a week, you can recover your work using these archives.
(we need more documentation somewhere on how to access snapshots)
Finally, the new file backend comes with newer, faster login servers. These Linux-based machines provide a shell account to students and employees, and provide a few common programming tools (along with the facilities to compile your own software to customize your environment as you see fit).
DFS will be decomissioned sometime during winter quarter of 2010. You can continue to use it in the meantime, but you will lose access to any data on DFS once it is decomissioned.
No; you will have to move your own files. We provide a tool called DZcopy to make this process relatively painless. You can also move files using the file manager in your operating system, or with tools available on the login servers. See the eHelp pages for moving users and groups more information.
Any files left on DFS when it is decomissioned (sometime in winter, 2010) will be lost forever.
http://www.princeton.edu/~unix/Solaris/troubleshoot/zfs.html
