AFS (on which DFS was based) lives on as OpenAFS [0]. And there is a commercial evolution/solution from AuriStor [1].

[0]: https://openafs.org/

[1]: https://www.auristor.com/filesystem/

Thank you! I knew it was from Andrew File System but did not manage to find those links by searching too narrowly.

DCE DFS (developed at Transarc) was originally supposed to be AFS 4.0 before it was contributed to DCE. After the contribution it became backward incompatible with AFS 3.x. The RPC layer, the authentication protocol, the protection service (user/group management) were all replaced to leverage technology contributions from other DCE participants.

IMO IBM/Transarc died for two reasons. First, there was significant brand confusion after the release of Windows Active Directory and Windows DFS since no trademarks were obtained for DCE service names. Second, the file system couldn't be deployed without the rest of the DCE infrastructure.

There was an unofficial effort within IBM to create the Advanced Distributed File System (ADFS) which would have decoupled DFS from the DCE Cell Directory Service and Security Service as well as replaced DCE/RPC. However, the project never saw the light of day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCE_Distributed_File_System

thanks : i hadn't known that larger context either, so very useful.

I used to administer AFS/DFS and braved the forest of platform ifdefs to port it to different unix flavors.

plusses were security (kerberos), better administrative controls and global file space.

minuses were generally poor performance, middling small file support and awful large file support. substantial administrative overhead. the wide-area performance was so bad the global namespace thing wasn't really useful.

I guess it didn't cause as many actual multi-hour outages NFS, but we used it primarily for home/working directories and left the servers alone, whereas the accepted practice at the time was to use NFS for roots and to cross mount everything so that it easily got into a 'help I've fallen and can't get up' situation.

that's very similar to what we were doing for the engineering workstations (hundreds of hosts across a very fast campus network)

(off topic, but great username)