[OpenAFS] Using OpenAFS for active replication?

[Mike Fedyk]

I was reading the old IBM docs on the openafs web site about replication 
and they say you should only use the replication on volumes that are 
infrequently updated, and possibly only managed by administrators since 
you need to run a "release" operation to update the read-only mirrors.

Is there a way to replicate an OAFS volume that will allow one user to 
save (and close) a file on a replicated volume and be able to know with 
confidence that another user (using another machine) will be able to 
access that updated file?

I don't have an environment with a lot of rapidly changing files, but 
the files that do change (office files, images, etc.) need to be 
accessible from other locations once they are saved.  Would I have to 
make sure those volumes are not replicated?

Last, but not least, I'd really like it if there was some way to use 
OAFS in a Linux-HA environment where the r/w volume fileserver goes down 
and a r/o fileserver for those volumes takes over as r/w (using STOMITH 
to prevent a split-brain from happening (two r/w fileservers that don't 
know about the other).  Is that a possibility?

I really like the caching affects that OAFS gives you, but for a r/w HA 
environment, Linux with ext3, LVM, DRDB, ACLs (& NFS4 in the future) 
looks promising, but still doesn't give active fileserver replication (I 
saw somewhere using DRBD or ENBD with one r/w and one or more r/o GFS 
fileservers together would give active replication, and the possibility 
of switching one of the r/o to r/w looks promising).

In summary, is OpenAFS moving in the direction of active replication?

Thanks,

Mike