The following is a list of technologies which are interesting and related to what we do and how we do it.
Coda is a descendant of AFS 2, and has many features that are badly needed by network filesystems, and which currently are only partly implemented in commercial products:
RedCrypt - teaching unix (esp FreeBSD) to respect other's passwords
RedCrypt is a alternative crypt(3). It enables many UNIX authentication programs (login, ftpd, telnetd, etc.) to redirect their authentication request to other host includes remote NIS domain, Windows NT network, etc. On FreeBSD is is implemented as a dynamic link library libredcrypt.so
Operating Systems
In addition to the usual commercial operating systems, the following four are noteworthy.
Linux is one of the most interesting things to arrive in years. We did not choose it for our Waterloo Polaris related servers, but there are likely many stations and small groups on campus who do use it and think its great. Linux is available for many different platforms, though obviously binary compatibility would be an issue. Linux has multiprocessor ports in production use and supports more oddball devices than anything... though the word beta seems to creap into everything. Several variants available.
FreeBSD has been the most predominant choice when we needed a solid unix fileserver but could not afford a traditional route. While FreeBSD can run Linux user binaries, its strength has been rock solid reliability and good performance with relatively modest hardware. It has been a safe and reliable choice. No varients, except multiprocessor on high end and embedded system PicoBSD. on the low end
NetBSD, OpenBSD Both of these systems have Intel ports, but have a wider general theme for many other CPUs. Both spend more emphasis on portability, and hit a slight compromise on speed. OpenBSD is more security gung-ho. Since our non-Intel hardware is usually much older (eg. basic scsi, basic Ethernet, small RAM), this was not attractive to us as using modern but inexpensive Intel-compatible hardware.
This is mostly useful for client stations (not servers) which need to connect to a CIFS based service for whatever reason.
This is a Cisco created protocol which can interface with other systems.