[OpenAFS-devel] OpenAFS Newsletter, Issue 5, September 2009

Jason Edgecombe jason@rampaginggeek.com
Mon, 07 Sep 2009 12:28:16 -0400


Here is the September 2009 issue of the OpenAFS Newsletter. An HTML 
version is available at
http://www.openafs.org/newsletter/newsletter-2009-09-volume001-issue05.html


OpenAFS Newsletter, Issue 5, September 2009
    Welcome to the fifth issue of the OpenAFS newsletter. This newsletter
    summarizes what is happening in the OpenAFS community.

    As always, volunteers, patches, bug reports, or any other type of help
    is greatly appreciated.

    Feedback on this newsletter is welcome. The goal is to summarize the
    various development efforts and news of OpenAFS for the community.
    Please let Jason Edgecombe <jason@rampaginggeek.com> know what
    you would like to see out of this newsletter. Any news about AFS-related
    projects is welcome and may be submitted to Jason for inclusion in the
    next newsletter.

    The current and past issues of this newsletter are available at
    <http://www.openafs.org/newsletter/>

  General OpenAFS Progress
    OpenAFS 1.5.62 was released on August 28, 2009. Highlights of this
    release include several critical bugfixes and support for Mac OS X Snow
    Leopard. 1.4.11 is still the recommended release for all Unix platforms,
    including Snow Leopard. Testing of the 1.5.62 version on Unix platforms
    is encouraged.

    Russ Allbery gave an update on the progress of a non-profit organization
    for OpenAFS. The Elders have decided that there are multiple issues,
    including on-going funding, that make the formation of a non-profit
    problematic at this time. In the interim, the Elders have voted
    unanimously to approach the Software Freedom Conservancy and request
    membership. The Elders will move forward with forming a foundation once
    the economy picks up. For more information and some important details,
    read Russ' announcement at:
    <http://lists.openafs.org/pipermail/openafs-announce/2009/000303.html>

  Events
   AFS Hackathon
    The School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh will be hosting
    an AFS Hackathon 22-24 September (immediately before the European AFS
    Conference). All OpenAFS developers are welcome to attend - please see
    the email to openafs-announce for details, and RSVP to sxw@inf.ed.ac.uk

   European AFS Meeting
    The University Roma Tre will host the 2009 European AFS Meeting from
    September 28-30. The European workshop is mainly a platform for system
    administrators to exchange their knowledge and report use cases. Topics
    of interest include related technologies like Kerberos or LDAP and all
    supported operating systems.

    For more details, go to <http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/~afscon09/>

   Annual Best Practices Workshop
    Plans are already underway for the seventh Workshop, to be held May
    24-28, 2010, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We hope
    to see you there.

  Projects
   *BSD Support
    Project Contacts:

    *   Matt Benjamin <matt@linuxbox.com>

    I've been working on NetBSD client targeting master. I've sent a number
    of changes, most committed, preparing for this. My plan is to have
    something committed by the EU AFS Conference in Rome.

   Extended Callback Information
    Project Contacts:

    *   Matt Benjamin <matt@linuxbox.com>

    The dependencies have begun to merge on the master branch (MCAS and all
    changes are merged, miniosi is in review, XCB changesets will follow).

   Kerberos v5 and Multiple Encryption Types
    Project Contacts:

    *   Matt Benjamin <matt@linuxbox.com>

    *   Marcus Watts <mwd@umich.edu>

    Marcus is preparing a draft paper describing the protocol and
    implementation details. (I've read a draft.) It is planned to be
    published in the next week or so. We began submitting split-out Rxk5
    changesets, the gatekeepers want to put these on a work-in-process git
    branch, more TBD.

    --Matt (Ed: Received Sept 4, 2009)

   Better Documentation
    Project Contacts:

    *   Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>

    *   Jason Edgecombe <jason@rampaginggeek.com>

    Jason updated sections 3.2 through 3.4 of chapter 2 in the Admin Guide.
    Information about cross-realm trusts and foreign PTS users was included.
    The instructions for submitting entries to the public CellServDB were
    updated. Some text about using Freelance and Dynamic Root modes to find
    foreign cells was added.

   Demand-Attach FileServer (DAFS)
    Project Contacts:

    *   Andrew Deason <adeason@sinenomine.net>

    *   Tom Keiser <tkeiser@sinenomine.net>

    *   Mike Meffie <mmeffie@sinenomine.net>

    Only one or two DAFS issues remain that we believe are critical: 124484
    (volumes not salvaged on first access from volserver), and possibly
    124487 (fileserver/salvageserver lock up). 124487 may already be fixed
    by a recently-merged patch for 124486 (fileserver hangs on shutdown), so
    124484 may be the only remaining critical issue.

    All other issues beyond those are either performance issues or are
    relatively minor. Once they are fixed, we consider DAFS to be
    production-ready, lacking any other issues. We can't fix issues we don't
    know about, though, so testing DAFS is greatly appreciated. Even if it
    may not appropriate for production in arbitrary critical environments
    quite yet, DAFS is definitely usable in its current state if you want to
    try it out.

    If you are interested in trying out DAFS, Steven Jenkins has written up
    how to get started with it here:
    
<http://blog.endpoint.com/2009/06/getting-started-with-demand-attach.html>

    --Andrew

   Userspace cache manager
    Project Contact:

    *   Andrew Deason <adeason@sinenomine.net>

    I have a working userspace unix OpenAFS client implemented via FUSE, and
    perl bindings to libuafs (via SWIG). Neither are as fully-featured as
    the kernel cache manager yet, but they are sufficient for simple
    filesystem access, and can be used to simulate multiple clients from a
    single machine.

    The code is not in the main repository yet, as I need to clean up some
    of the libuafs modifications, and make it play nice with the other users
    of libuafs. If you want to mess around with them, though, feel free to
    contact me.

   Mac OS X OpenAFS Preference Pane
    Project Contact:

    *   Claudio Bisegni <Claudio.Bisegni@lnf.infn.it>

    The work done on the preference pane was directed to clean the code for
    deprecated API's and adjustment for Snow Leopard. NSMenuExtra is a
    private API that was never supported and has been changed to a
    Background Only Application (AFSBackgrounder) that uses NSStatusItem to
    show the OpenAFS lock icon on the OS X menu bar. The AFSBackgrounder is
    also used to get a token at login time.

   Google Summer of Code 2009
    OpenAFS received four slots for the 2009 Google Summer of Code.

    Go to <http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/openafs> for
    more information about the GSoC projects.

    The following projects did not give a status update:

    *   Implementing OpenAFS Features into RedHat's kafs Kernel Module

    *   OpenAFS Management Console on Windows

    *   OpenAFS Server Preference Based on Network Conditions

   Projects with no progress or no update
    *   Disconnected AFS support

    *   Pthreaded Ubik

    *   Rx OSD integration & Raw Vicep Access in Clients

  Resolved Tickets
    Here is a list of tickets that have been resolved since August 1, 2009:

      ticket # state     created       title
       108199: resolved  Jul 21, 2008  Incomplete file transfer : Bug Report
       125211: resolved  Aug 12, 2009  OpenAFS 1.5.61 says invalid cell 
during install
       125217: resolved  Aug 13, 2009  OpenAFS configure script of the 
source RPM doen't handle INIT_WORK_HAS_DATA macro correctly on SLES-11
       125220: resolved  Aug 13, 2009  Bug Report
       125298: resolved  Aug 28, 2009  find_task_by_vpid removed in 
kernel 2.6.31
       125301: resolved  Aug 28, 2009  OpenAFS 1.5.62 version discrepancy