[OpenAFS-devel] Soft mounts for /afs root

[Ted McCabe]

At 2:10 PM +0200 6/14/01, Harald Barth wrote:
>>  We'd like to get feedback from the AFS user community regarding this
>>  project.  Does it seem like a useful function?  Any specific features
>>  that people feel we should include?  Also, we would like to know if work
>>  is already underway on such a project.
>
>Arla supports the creation of such a replacement /afs with the
>--dynroot (or -D) option. The implementation was started July 1999 and
>has been documented and useful since September 2000. The current
>implementation needs the cell names to be listed (but not necessarily
>their database servers if you use AFSDRRs) in the CellServDB. I'm
>working on an implementation that does not have any need for a
>root.cell or CellServDB, starting out with an empty /afs and learns
>cells on the fly. I will talk about that at the AFS workshop which is
>coming up at USENIX.

Is this learning cells "on the fly" explicit, via some command that 
tells the client that there should now be an entry in /afs for 
/afs/some-new-cell or implicit, such that a readdir of /afs may show 
nothing yet accessing /afs/my-favorite-cell both works and creates 
/afs/my-favorite-cell?

I have a lot of trouble picturing how the implicit approach would 
make sense to a user.

    --Ted