[OpenAFS-devel] Re: [OpenAFS] 2.6 kernel support anytime soon? Workarounds?

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

On Tuesday, May 11, 2004 19:00:57 -0400 Mitch Collinsworth 
<mitch@ccmr.cornell.edu> wrote:

>
> On Tue, 11 May 2004, Jeffrey Hutzelman wrote:
>
>> And the statement stands.  Either you have control over a machine, or you
>> don't.  If you do, then when you decide that machine is going to run AFS,
>> you're going to also have to commit to setting aside some GID space.
>> Making that decision for every machine simultaneously makes the task
>> _easier_, not harder, if you've done things right.
>
> I don't recall ever being told to do this, either in the Transarc
> training class or in the manuals.  And frankly I never gave it much
> thought.  Until today.
>
> Do you tell students and others when telling them to install the AFS
> client if they want to use the departmental filesystem from their
> machines that they have to avoid using a range of gids?  We don't.
> Does anyone?

Your question assumes a model in which individual uses install and maintain 
their own machines, with the department providing only a filesystem and a 
few other services.  For us, that assumption is false -- we provide a 
complete multi-platform distributed computing environment.  Today AFS is an 
integral part of that environment.  The UID and GID spaces have been 
centrally managed since well before AFS was of any significance.


But your point is well taken.  I'll bet that most AFS users and even admins 
aren't particularly aware of the group overlap issue.  And, that's probably 
something we should try to change, since we're unlikely to be able to 
eliminate the problem anytime soon.

-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <jhutz+@cmu.edu>
   Sr. Research Systems Programmer
   School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility
   Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA