[OpenAFS] AFS cell path shortcuts

[Kevin Hildebrand]

Hello, we are shortly going to have an opportunity to do some redesign of 
our AFS cell, and I'm wondering what others have done in the following 
situation-

Currently, on all of our machines, we have a local filesystem link "/:" 
that points to either the RW cell (/afs/.glue.umd.edu), or the RO cell 
(/afs/glue.umd.edu).

(/: was picked following the DCE/DFS convention).

This makes it very easy for us to switch a machine from looking at the RO 
cell (production) to the RW cell (development), without having to specify 
alternate paths.  Everything on the machine references /: instead of one 
of the direct paths.  i.e.,  /usr/local is a symlink to 
/:/system/1.5/@sys/usr/local.   So you can install things into /usr/local 
by switching one symlink.

This scheme works superbly with one exception- the ':' character won't 
work in certain places like PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc.

I'm thinking of replacing the /: link with something like /cell to 
eliminate this problem.

Has anyone else done something similar?

Thanks,

Kevin Hildebrand
University of Maryland, College Park