[OpenAFS] OpenAFS on MacOS X

[Patrick J. LoPresti]

Derek Atkins <warlord@MIT.EDU> writes:

> Timeout for each down server would be relatively short (a minute?).
> My suggestion would be to break up "users" into smaller subdirectories
> like users/[a-z]/...

I will probably do that anyway, but that is not really a solution
unless there is some correlation between the username and their file
server.  Hm...

> Besides, if you have a downed fileserver you have bigger things to
> worry about than people trying to browse the user list :)

That problem is not so much "down" as "unavailable".  We have two
offices at opposite sides of the U.S.  The connectivity between them
is pretty good but not perfect.  I was hoping to get away with a
single AFS cell by making careful use of replicated volumes.

> > Having an option to make stat() on mountpoints not chase them would be
> > handy; you could solve this problem with replicated RO volumes.
> 
> The problem is that then you could not trust the information you get
> back from stat().  The owner, unix permissions, etc. are all stored
> in the volume itself and not in the mountpoint.  You can't easily
> change _that_, because volumes can be mounted in multiple places.
> It would violate the security semantics if a volume took the
> permissions of its parent.

As someone else pointed out, sometimes the only interesting
information about the mount point is that it is a directory.  Of
course, I would only want this as an option (per-mountpoint would be
ideal), not as the default.  Someone suggested this for root.afs; I am
suggesting it could be useful elsewhere.

You could get really fancy and have the stat() return "correct"
information if the data were readily available (say, already in the
cache?) but return "faked" information otherwise.  Or return one thing
for stat("foo") and something else for chdir("foo");stat(".").  OK,
maybe not :-).  But having the permissions shown by stat() be wrong,
or even having them change randomly, is a small price to pay for
letting Windows and Mac users browse around in an environment with
dodgy connectivity, IMHO.

 - Pat