Administering and Hacking the Coda File System | ||
---|---|---|
Prev | Chapter 1. Basic concepts |
This section gives an introduction to the server organization.
On the server side Coda is perhaps even more different from other servers than it is as a client. Coda does not export a subtree of the fileservers Unix directory tree, as NFS, Samba and AppleTalk would do. Instead a server maintains volumes of files. A volume is a logical unit of files, typically much smaller than a file system filling an entire disk partition, typically much larger than a directory. Volumes have a root and contain a directory tree with files.
One volume is special, it is the root volume, the volume which Coda mounts on /coda. Other volumes are grafted into the /coda tree using the cfs makemount. This command installs a volume mountpoint in the Coda directory tree, and in effect its result is similar to mkdir mountpoint ; mount device mountpoint under Unix. When invoking the cfs makemount the two arguments given are the name of the mountpoint and the name of the volume to be mounted.