[OpenAFS-devel] Mixed server versions within a cell (longish...)

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

On Thursday, March 10, 2005 08:55:41 PM -0500 Kevin <openafsd@gnosys.biz> 
wrote:


> Excerpted from the Administration Guide, The Four Roles..., Binary
> Distribution Machines
> ========================
> ...For consistent system performance, however, all server machines
> _must_ run the same version (build level) of a process. For instructions
> for checking a binary's build level, see Displaying A Binary File's
> Build Level...
> ========================

Don't worry about it.  The Transarc/IBM documentation is rather 
conservative about this.  The VLDB format hasn't changed in several years 
(since before the first OpenAFS release), and the PRDB format hasn't 
changed in over a decade.  For the moment, it is safe to mix and match 
OpenAFS database servers of any versions.  However, if you have more than 
one dbserver in your cell, you don't want any of them to be a version older 
than 1.2.11, because of a bug in older that prevents establishment of a 
quorum after Jan 10, 2004.

It has always been safe to mix fileserver versions within a cell, with any 
version database servers.  I don't expect this to change in OpenAFS any 
time soon.

It is likely that sometime in the future, there will be incompatible 
changes to both the VLDB and PRDB formats which require upgrading all 
database servers across a particular version boundary at the same time. 
Because the people working on projects requiring these changes for the most 
part don't like flag days, it seems likely there will be a clean upgrade 
mechanism.




> I don't get these results with any of the binaries in either OAFS server
> version.

Those instructions apply to IBM AFS; they are based on searching for a 
particular pattern which appears in the version strings compiled into IBM 
AFS binaries.  That pattern does not appear in OpenAFS's version strings. 
Instead, you should try looking for the strings 'OpenAFS'.

You can also find the version of a running server or workstation by using 
'rxdebug -version'




> 3) I have noticed one minor annoyance: when copying the i386_linux26
> binaries from the local disk of the new server machine to the
> i386_linux26 volume (hosted by the new server, replicated to the
> original server, and mounted in the /afs tree), the process took a great
> deal of time (> 10 minutes for the 24 binaries in /usr/afs/bin).

That seems excessively slow.  Perhaps you you have a configuration problem 
in your client.

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