[OpenAFS-devel] MIT supports OpenAFS under RHEL 3 and RHEL 4.

[William Cattey]

Sorry for the delay in replying.  I had to check in with others to  
get the facts correct, and then got backlogged with another project.

Summary:

We currently build from local distributions of kerberos and  
incorporate the NRL AFS-krb5 migration kit.  But stuff is changing  
here to try and do less with locally built stuff, and more standard  
issue binaries or source trees.  That mayinclude Red Hat Enterprise  
Linux 3, if our customers are  slow to embrace RHEL 4.

Detail:

(Some of the explanation is known to  Derek but it included for  
clarity to the broader openafs-devel readership.)

We have two builds of AFS, at MIT: one for Athena which tightly  
integrates AFS, the OS (in this case Linux), and other applications  
and services, and the other which is for stock Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

On Athena our aklog and asetkey come from the NRL AFS-krb5 migration  
kit.
For stand-alone RHEL 3 we use Derek's RPMs.

We're in process of making Athena rely less upon locally built source  
trees, and more upon the binaries that third parties compile and  
distribute.

We allowed ourselves to be distracted with other work rather than  
pushing our customers to migrate their AFS-requiring RHEL 4  
installations to something based on an OpenAFS Release Candidate.   
Now that we have an official OpenAFS 1.4.1 that fully supports Red  
Hat Enterprise 4, we can get traction on getting our customers to  
standardize on RHEL 4, and leave RHEL3.  If we are unsuccessful in  
weaning our customers off RHEL3, we may find ourselves in a situation  
where we build from stock sources or incorporate stock binaries, but  
do so on top of RHEL 3.

Bottom Line: doing RHEL 3 sensibly is helpful to us, and makes for a  
more graceful fall-back situation if our customers are slow to  
embrace RHEL 4.

I hope this provides the clarity you seek in understanding our desire  
for RHEL 3 support in OpenAFS.

-wdc


On Apr 19, 2006, at 5:42 PM, Derek Atkins wrote:

> Just as a point of information, there are two related problems.  The
> RHEL3 build issue is trying to build the OpenAFS-provided aklog/ 
> asetkey.
> The RHEL4 build issue is a problem building against the 2.6.9 kernel.
> I dont think there has been any contention about my patch to solve
> the RHEL4/Linux-2.6.9 build issue.  The contention has been about
> fixing the RHEL3 aklog build issue.
>
> Does MIT use the OpenAFS-provided aklog and asetkey on RHEL3?  Also,
> does MIT build against the RHEL3-provided Kerberos 1.2.7?
>
> -derek
>
> Quoting William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>:
>
>> I was pleased to see Jeff advocate in favor of a patch to enable   
>> OpenAFS 1.4.1 to happily build for Red Hat Enterprise 3.  MIT   
>> currently supports both Red Hat Enterprise 3 and Red Hat  
>> Enterprise  4.  We have varying degrees of support for both of  
>> these platforms,  and of OpenAFS 1.2.11, and 1.4.1 on them.
>>
>> We'd like to standardize on OpenAFS 1.4.1 for BOTH RHEL 3 and RHEL  
>> 4,  so as to enable our customers a graceful migration path from  
>> RHEL 3  to RHEL 4 with AFS as a crucial piece of the infrastructure.
>>
>> So YES! Thank you!  OpenAFS 1.4.1 on both RHEL 3 and RHEL 4 is a  
>> GOOD  thing for us!
>>
>> -wdc
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> OpenAFS-devel mailing list
>> OpenAFS-devel@openafs.org
>> https://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/openafs-devel
>>
>
>
>
> -- 
>       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
>       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
>       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
>       warlord@MIT.EDU                        PGP key available
>