The Andrew File System was developed at Carnegie Mellon University
(and named Andrew are the founder's first name), as part of a large
project in next generation distributed systems in the mid 1980s.
It has two main components; Vice and Venus:
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Vice provides the shared file system
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Venus provides the redirector function for clients
AFS has two main advantages over some other systems in terms of scaling:
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Prefix naming - path name prefixes are used to provide location
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Whole File Caching - the First access to a file causes it to appear in
its entirety on the client machines local disk.
The development of the 3 versions of AFS through time is an
instructive lesson in good distributed systems design, since the
later phases solved problems that were preceived i nthe earlier
versions by a series of refinements whcih were not precluded in any
way by earlier designs. We look at this development next.