[OpenAFS] General OpenAFS question

[Christopher D. Clausen]

infoshare <info@infoshare-consulting.com> wrote:
> I am trying to figure out if OpenAFS is the solution to my problem
> (before testing)...
>
> I have about 6 different servers with multiple drives/volumes on each.
> Each of the drives have a very similar file directory layout.
> What I am trying to do is merge all of these locations into one
> location that can be both read and written to just like a network
> resource (windows - shares).
>
> My guess is that OpenAFS (installed on each server) would allow me to
> collectivly pool all of the free disk space available on all of the
> volumes and allow me to access this collective pool via a network
> share.

It depends what you mean by "collectivly pool."  AFS can provide a 
common namespace for individual volumes (here I mean AFS volumes, which 
is specific and likely different from your usage of volumes above) 
residing on a large number of seperate physical AFS servers.  However, 
AFS volumes cannot span servers.  Each AFS volume must reside in a 
single vice paritition on a single AFS server.  If you are okay with 
spliting your disk space into individual management units (AFS volumes) 
than AFS may work for you.

> Is openAfs for windows my solution?

Note: You very likely do not want to run AFS servers on Windows.  The 
Windows client does work quite well though.

If you are in an all Windows environment and are running Active 
Directory, I suggest you look into using Microsoft's Distributed 
Filesystem (Dfs.)  It has a different feature set than AFS and might be 
more useful to you.

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