[OpenAFS-devel] openafs cell and contrib area?

[Derek Atkins]

Nathan Neulinger <nneul@umr.edu> writes:

> > - the problem of cooperating with regions under separate
> > administration was why cells were invented.  (that, and the fact
> > that inventing cells was Quick And Dirty).  Aesthetically, I'd like
> > to see a new model hew as closely to the old one as possible.
> > Simplicity *is* a virtue.
>
> Right - why do we need to have a big distributed openafs.org cell?
> (I mean, it would be nice, but is it critical?)

Actually, yes.  AFS clients are useless without pointing them at an
AFS Cell.  I believe that to be truly successful, we need to have a
'default' AFS Cell that can be the 'default' ThisCell in OpenAFS
distributions.  Obviously, people at large sites that are currently
using AFS would want to point their clients at their own cell.
However, it would be nice if OpenAFS were _useful_ out-of-the-box
without human intervention, in ALL cases.

If we travel down this road, we would need a distributed primary cell
such that someone in Somalia wouldn't have to have packets travel all
the way to Pittsburgh just to start AFS ;)

-derek
-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/      PP-ASEL      N1NWH
       warlord@MIT.EDU                        PGP key available