[OpenAFS-devel] A few questions about the current Linux implementation of the AFS client

[Derek Atkins]

"Patrick J. LoPresti" <patl@curl.com> writes:

> Matt Peterson <matt@caldera.com> writes:
> 
> >    3 - The AFS Client implementation on Linux is poorly designed and very
> >        unstable to the point that reboots become common place.
> 
> Could you elaborate on this?  I am planning an AFS rollout here, but
> we hammer our file systems extremely hard.  If AFS on Linux is not
> ready for production use, that could prove an embarrassment.
> 
> What sort of problems are you having?  Are other people on this list
> having trouble too?

There are known screw cases in the current code.  In particular, if a
client starts with network "configured" but not working, or without
being able to contact their AFS servers, it will get into a state
where the only recovery option is to reboot.  I don't know of any
others off the top of my head, but this is a kind of major one.

If you're at all worried, you could always use the dynamic root code
on your clients so they build /afs locally, dymanically.  This should
work much better as of the next (1.2.3) release.

>  - Pat

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
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