[OpenAFS-devel] Re: on sockets and devices in AFS

[omalleys@msu.edu]

Quoting Jeffrey Altman <jaltman@secure-endpoints.com>:
....
> In the meantime, no client today is capable of using these future object
> types and as a result I believe that the proper behavior for today's
> clients is to maintain the object locally and mask it from the file
> server.  That way it becomes possible for future local pipes to be
> created within the file system directory without breaking today's
> clients that will not know what to do with them.

Can we get this planned out well enough to simply add the ability of  
current clients to be aware enough to ignore these new special file  
types? When the work is done for the full implementation, we won't  
have the backwards compatibility nightmares?

I think it is also needed to add the ability both server and client  
side to block these abilities on a per user, per client basis. The  
administrator of the client machine has to have the ability to stomp  
some of these files in case they are causing issues to the particular  
system on which the client is running and they might not be  
administrator of AFS and the administrator of AFS might not want to  
allow this functionality at all.

Sean