[OpenAFS] General OpenAFS question

[Jason Edgecombe]

infoshare wrote:
> Some of the servers are not windows based and one of them are still only an
> xp professional system (which doesn't support windows dfs).  Does anyone
> know of a system that would allow me to have one virtual volume that spans
> multiple systems?  I'm not worried about having much functionality beyond
> this feature.
>   
OpenAFS has clients for most platforms.

Chris Clausen is correct in that an AFS volume cannot span servers, but 
an AFS volume can be as small as one directory. AFS volumes can be 
mounted as directories.

Here is an example:

say you have the following directory structure:

/afs/yourcell.com/dir1
/afs/yourcell.com/dir2
/afs/yourcell.com/dir3
/afs/yourcell.com/users/user1

/afs/yourcell.com should be read=only and replicated on multiple servers 
(i.e. server A, server B, server C).
/afs/yourcell.com/dir1 and dir2 could  be hosted on server B.
/afs/yourcell.com/dir3 could be on server C
/afs/yourcell.com/users could be in the same volume as /afs/yourcell.com.
/afs/yourcell.com/users/user1 should be it's own volume and  could be on 
server A.

It's recommended that each user's home directory be in its own volume.

If Alice has a lot of data in her research folder, then it could be in 
its own volume where /afs/yourcell.com/users/alice could be on server B 
and /afs/yourcell.com/users/alice/research could be on server C.

Does that make sense? A volume is mounted as a directory in the tree and 
it can be mounted anywhere under /afs/yourcell.com. In essense, each 
directory can be on a different server, but that must be balanced with 
the administration overhead.

Sincerely,
Jason