[OpenAFS] Directory layout for new cells

[Kelsang Wangden]

To answer the question about layouts ...

We built a new cell from scratch last December because our old cell
had gotten quite crufty, and we were moving to new servers for Y2K
anyway.  I asked for some feedback on info-afs@transarc.org and got
some really good responses - you might want to look in the archive for
those.

Anyway, here's the layout we settled on in /afs/src.uchicago.edu:

admin/                  administrative files
arch/
    sun4x_57/           one directory per @sys
    hp_ux102/
    ...
common/                 stuff common to all system types
data/                   stuff belonging to our data library
home/                   symlinks to user home directories
pkg/                    opt-style software installations
users/                  actual user home directories
www/                    web pages

Under arch/@sys and common/ are directories such as bin, lib, include,
and man.  In the arch/@sys ones the contents are generally symlinks
into pkg/<pkgname>/.  In common/, these are generally scripts and
config files which work across architechtures.

In pkg/, there is a directory for each version of each software
package - e.g. automake-1.4, bison-1.28, etc.  Inside each of these
are the standard dirctories such as bin, lib, and include.  Some
things are broken down further by architechture name (generaly bin and
lib).

Under users/ we have the user directories split up to keep directory
contents low.  If your username is foobar, for example, then the
official mount point for your home directory is users/f/o/foobar/, but
I wouldn't actually tell you that.  home/foobar is a symlink to there,
and that's the one I tell users.  (Actually I tell them
/afs/home/foobar, because /afs/home is a symlink to
/afs/src.uchicago.edu/home/.)

User web pages live in volumes which are mounted once inside www/ and
once in their home directories.  If they want multiple users editing
the files, then multiple users get a mount of the volume in their home
directories.  Because of this, ordinary users don't need read access
to the web tree, and permissions can be quite tight.

I think that covers it.  This is probably more complexity than the
average user wants if they're just installing a package with dselect
or apt-get.  Good AFS cell structure takes some thinking, some
planning, and (IMHO) some experience with good or bad structure to
which you can compare your ideas.

Regards,

Wangden
-- 
Kelsang Wangden (Buddhist monk)        Technical Manager
Social Science Research Computing, University of Chicago
       wngdn@src.uchicago.edu      (773) 702-3792
  PGP key:  http://www.src.uchicago.edu/~wngdn/key.txt