[OpenAFS] Problem with cell name aliases in CellServDB

[Markus Alt]

Hi all,

when trying to acquire a token for a foreign cell, I get the message

 Unable to authenticate to AFS because unknown cell was passed to
SetToken.

on my Linux machine (SuSE 7.2, stock 2.4.7, OpenAFS 1.1.1). A "cd" to
that
cell's root directory results in a "No such file or directory.". Now,
the special thing with that cell (the IBM Burlington cell, BTW) is, that
there is a cell name's alias defined in the CellServDB like this:

 >btv.ibm.com micro.ibm.com      #IBM Burlington
 9.66.4.22                       #dbsrv0.btv.ibm.com
 9.66.4.23                       #dbsrv1.btv.ibm.com
 9.66.4.24                       #dbsrv2.btv.ibm.com
 9.66.4.33                       #dbsrv3.btv.ibm.com
 9.66.4.34                       #dbsrv4.btv.ibm.com

I've been told that this might be because of the AFS/DFS translator
(although I'm not familiar with the latter), as "micro.ibm.com" is the
name of the DCE/DFS cell in Burlington which is also contained in the
CellServDB:

 >micro.ibm.com                  #Burlington DCE cell
 9.66.11.34                      #micfldb0.btv.ibm.com
 9.66.11.36                      #micfldb1.btv.ibm.com
 9.66.133.15                     #micfldb2.btv.ibm.com

Double-checked on my RS/6000 which runs IBM AFS 3.6 build level 2.18 and
a "cd /afs/btv.ibm.com" as well as getting a token for that cell worked
just fine. Removing the alias "micro.ibm.com" from the line starting
with ">btv.ibm.com" makes things work as expected. So I suspect OpenAFS
to have a problem with such cell name aliases.

Anyone having similar behaviour? Any ideas?

TIA,
Markus

-- 
Markus Alt
IBM Lab Boeblingen, Germany
altmark@de.ibm.com