Coda is a functional distributed filesystem that is relatively easy to install, configure, and use. As explained earlier in this article, Coda is designed as a distributed filesystem that you can use when you're connected to the network, quickly configure for use when you're not connected to the network (as explained in the previous section), and automatically synchronize back to the networked filesystem when you reconnect to the network.

This article explained the highlights of installing Coda clients and servers. As with any distributed filesystem, there are many administrative issues that were glossed over. For a complete discussion of using and administering Coda, see the official Coda documentation that is available at http://coda.cs.cmu.edu.

The next article in this series discusses using OpenAFS, which is the Open Source version of the AFS filesystem that was Coda's original parent project. Different filesystems are designed to address different issues--as we'll see in the next article, OpenAFS is a popular distributed filesystem that benefits from the AFS filesystem's years of research and commercial use and testing. OpenAFS is a very secure, stable, and powerful distributed filesystem that is actively used in hundreds of commercial and research installations all over the world.

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