[OpenAFS] Re: [possibly dumb question] volume must occupy entire OS-level filesystem?

[Leroy Tennison]

Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:

>
> On Dec 18, 2005, at 8:47 , zeroguy wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 18 Dec 2005 17:02:10 -0800
>> Adam Megacz <megacz@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>>
>>> Regarding the paragraph above, I know what inodes are and the  point of
>>> the namei() system call, but I wasn't aware that AFS fileserver
>>> instances came in two "flavors" with these names, or their exact
>>> meaning in this particular context (though I can take a guess).
>>
>>
>> Unless I'm mistaken, fewer people are using inode-based fileservers
>> these days, as the benefits of running one over a namei server  (speed?)
>> are becoming less significant, and it's supported on fewer OSes (I
>> think...)
>
>
> inode fileservers need to know far more about the internals of the  
> host filesystem, which makes them much less portable; namei  
> fileservers can run on top of almost anything.  inode is slightly  
> faster, which mattered when the average fileserver was a pmax or etc.  
> but is much less relevant on modern, or even 2 years back, hardware.
>
> Additionally, fsck on an inode fileserver partition will destroy it  
> since all the volumes are raw inodes not attached to the filesystem  
> with magic metadata which fsck thinks is erroneous (IBM AFS used to  
> ship with "vfsck" which understood this and handled it correctly, but  
> it had to be based on vendor code that wasn't always available to  
> OpenAFS); but normal fsck is safe on a namei partition.
>
I installed OpenAFS on Fedora Core 3 using the RPMs, how do I tell 
whether I'm using an inode or namei fileserver?