[OpenAFS] Re: Swap RW and RO volumes ?

[Andrew Deason]

On Wed, 16 Dec 2009 15:34:33 -0500
Derrick Brashear <shadow@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 3:19 PM, Richard Brittain
> <Richard.Brittain@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> > We have some large data volumes not backed up in any way other than
> > a daily replicate to a different server. =A0The users normally access
> > the volume via an explicit RW mount point.

So, do you need them to actually be normal RO volumes? This sounds more
like a use case for shadow volumes, but you need to be a little careful
with those.

> > My question is, if I want to drain a volume of all RW volumes so I
> > can do kernel updates etc. without a user-visible outage, is there
> > any way to effectively swap the RW and RO volumes.
> > Something like:
> > =A0Lock RW
> > =A0Release to bring RO in sync
> > =A0Make RW 'offline'
> > =A0Promote RO to RW in the VLDB
> > =A0Demote old RW to RO in the VLDB
> > =A0Unlock

You can sorta do part of that with 'vos convertROtoRW', but it's not a
VLDB-only operation; you gotta change disk metadata, too. Can't convert
an RW back to an RO, though.

> I could imagine a tool which took the volume offline, rewrote the
> volume header, changed the VLDB entry to invert the IDs, and put it
> back online. There's no such tool that I know of now.

And I think there'd be problems if you tried to use such a thing with
more than one RO.

> However, once they're in sync, you might be able to vos clone the
> readonly on the non-rw site to an rw, then update the vldb. i'd have
> to read code/try it.

I thought something about the way we COW made cloning a bit one-way. At
the very least, the vol header would indicate the clone as a non-RW, I
think.

--=20
Andrew Deason
adeason@sinenomine.net