Hi people,
Lately I was pondering a problem with a friend of mine: how to easilly find stored files when you have a lot of files.
As amazing it sounds, there is no easy solution to this problem… Besides using BeOS and its wonderful attributes/queries system! 
So, we came up with the idea of using Haiku as the operating system for a home-brewed NAS (Network Attached Storage). It actually makes a lot of sense: the query system needs to be on the device hosting the data. Using a BeOS/Haiku NAS would be able to store all the data on BeFS partitions, using attributes to enter additionnal informations about the files ands using the amazing query system of BeOS/Haiku to easilly find anything back.
All the querying stuff can be easilly done from another computer, using SSH (or even plain telnet at first) to issue commands to the terminal of the BeOS/Haiku machine. Samba would be used to add and retrieve easilly files from the NAS. Management of the attributes of the files would be easy too by using again SSH/telnet.
So, it looks like it would be quite an easy task and the result would be exactly what we want. The perfect solution! 
My question is more about the Haiku status... Do you think it would be a good idea to use Haiku to build this NAS? Haiku is still young and the worst thing that could happen would be loss of the stored data.
Actually, I really wonder about OpenBeFS. If Haiku crashes, well, it’s not the end of the world; we’re speaking of a home NAS that could be easilly rebooted, and that is not used for critical tasks. I’m more concerned about corruption of the file-system itself, and losing content of the disks. That would be much more a problem than a simple crash of the OS. Besides, another problem is that basically you can’t read BeFS/OpenBeFS partitions from Windows or Linux. There barely is some read-only driver that looks unfinished and untrustworthy.
So how is going OpenBeFS? Is it stable, good working, reliable?
Actually, I would be more confident in using BeOS rather than Haiku because it isn't alpha software :-) but on the other side, using software that died nearly ten years ago is always a bad idea. Moreover I can't think of getting BeOS working properly on any modern hardware... Especially the Gigabit network card :-P
We also searched for a solution using Linux but to no avail. Looks like BeOS, so many years after its death, still have miles of advances over other operating systems in some areas. Basically it’s very hard to find a common file-system that provides attributes in a BeFS way, and then no software ever use it. BlueEyedOS could have ultimately provided it (BeOS features on top of Linux) but like all BeOS-aftermath projects except Haiku, it died several years ago. I’m at the point where we either do it with Haiku, or completely forget the idea of queries 
and go for a more classic route.
What do you think about it?