[OpenAFS-devel] Re: on sockets and devices in AFS

[chas williams - CONTRACTOR]

dont some applications sort of rely on the named piped/socket being
unique on a cluster filesystem as a part of their locking system.

i wont want to use pipes/socket as a general purpose communication
system across afs though.  there are probably better choices.  i just
want a globally consistent reference in the filesystem to a local/client
context.

On Thu, 16 Sep 2010 10:59:06 -0600
"Spencer E. Olson" <olsonse@umich.edu> wrote:

> From the users' point of view, practically speaking, another
> advantage for not writing these back is that a user could start up
> processes that create these sockets/pipes from multiple locations
> without disruption.  
> 
> If you have sockets/named pipes written back to the server, can they
> really be used from multiple clients?  The idea of "distributed
> sockets/named pipes" as Tom Keiser pointed out would require
> implementation in the file server,  i.e. socket/pipe data to be sent
> accross the file server (wouldn't it?).  It also seems that this kind
> of solution would require some new type of knowledge on the part of
> the software that reads/writes to/from the sockets/pipes.  This seems
> a bit more of a stretch in terms of purpose/goals of AFS.