[OpenAFS-devel] Proposed change for handling backup volumes

[Kris Van Hees]

On Mon, Jul 07, 2003 at 04:22:05PM -0500, Nathan Neulinger wrote:
> I can see this as being a dangerous change of behavior... Think about
> the:
> 
>    oh damn, I just screwed something up, quick - remount the .backup
> volume so I have some time to fix it.
> 
> With the semantics of the below patch, that would suddenly change what
> that operation meant.
> 
> Definately NOT something to have enabled by default. 
> 
> I would almost rather see a new mount syntax. Right now there are the
> two different mount types - one normal, and one to force RW (ignoring
> the cellular mounts). Could we not add another one that forces BK with
> less side-effects than this change? Granted, it would require client
> (and server?) changes to take effect though... 

That does not address the actual issue that this patch is supposed to address,
which is the ability to provide a partial or full 'tree' of backup volumes for
general use.  That somewhat depends on being able to walk the tree starting at
a given backup volume that is mounted specifically as a backup volume.  And to
be sure that from there all mountpoints will resolve to backup volumes if:

	- the mointpoint is not explicitly RW or RO
	- backup volumes exist for that mountpoint

In that case a new mount syntax doesn't really do you any good, because this
type of usage needs to be able to depend on 'normal' mountpoints being processed
in a specific way.

	Kris