Connectathon 2007

I'm trying (with mixed success) to travel less this year, and was going to skip Connectathon this year. However, I currently own the sessions portion of the NFSv4.1 spec, and several developers had issues and questions so I showed up for a few days. I didn't catch many presentations. Three presentations you might look at are Dave Noveck (one of my fellow NFSv4.1 specification editors) via his proxy Tom Talpey presented an excellent summary of new stuff in NFSv4.1 versus NFSv4.0. Ben Rockwood (of the cuddletech storage blog) discussed how he and his employer use NFS in what seems to be an OpenSolaris-only shop. Interestingly, Ben seems to be using bleeding edge OpenSolaris code which is a sharp contrast from my experience with how customers use Linux. Finally, Brent Callaghan of Apple discussed the NFS client and server changes in the upcoming Leopard release of Mac OSX. Brent's talk is a good reminder why a monoculture in the desktop computing space is bad thing, because Brent and his team produced a lot of interesting ideas and innovations. For example, Leopards adds Kerberized NFS support, joing Solaris, Linux, and AIX among the UNIX-like NFS clients, but rather than stick Keberos credentials in a ticket file, the tickets are kept per-user instance of the gssd daemon. BTW, Leopard will have a rudimentary NFSv4 client.