[OpenAFS] Is OpenAFS appropriate?

[Hendrik Hoeth]

Hi Stephen,

> Please be fair. This is not just a "cell from scratch", this is also 
> "administrator from scratch." No previous experience with AFS; no 
> previous *exposure* to AFS, and no buddies with any of these either. 

four days are a good time under this circumstances, I think.
(remembering my first, second, third and fourth cell, which I all
completely deleted before I got my first one working ...)

> In my defence, too, most of that four days was spent reading the
> documentation, which is such a mess of self-referencing hyperlinks
> that if you don't force yourself to ignore them and read sequentially,
> you can easily miss vital points.

At a certain point in time during my first installation, I just printed
the IBM AFS Administration Guide (the pdf file). Much better to read
than on the screen, and heavily used ...

> Here's the concern, probably typical of a noob -- "what if something
> goes wrong, and we lose our AFS infrastructure, but still have our
> partitions?" Is the data gone? How hard would it be for us to get it
> back?

If you still have the vicepx partitions, the data is not gone. Though
it's not very easy to extract it ...

If you understand a bit german, you may have a look into
http://archiv.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/2003/0130/data/index.htm
That's a talk held on the german afs-workshop last fall, and I learned a
lot of it. It describes the data structures in /vicepxx in detail.

Hendrik

-- 
Je mehr ich plane, desto haerter trifft mich die Wirklichkeit.
(Friedrich Duerrenmatt)