[OpenAFS] readonly/readwrite

[Corey Kovacs]

> Second, the organization of things.  People generally recommended not
> to put hundreds or thousands of home directories in the same parent
> directory, because ls time goes into the toilet.  What we ended up
> doing was creating a volume called "users" mounted at
> /afs/<cell>/users.  Inside that, we have two layers of subdirectories
> corresponding to the first two characters of the username to break
> things up.  So for example, my "wngdn" account is at
> /afs/<cell>/users/w/n/wngdn, and that directory is a mount point for
> my personal volume (users.wngdn).
>
> Then to make things less confusing for the users, we created a volume
> called "home" and mounted it at /afs/<cell>/home, and populated it
> with symlinks to people's actual home directories.  So,
> /afs/<cell>/home/wngdn points to /afs/<cell>/users/w/n/wngdn.
>
> Then, we made a symlink in root.afs (/afs) called "home" and pointed
> at /afs/<cell>/home.  What we tell users is that their home directory
> is /afs/home/<username>, which is short and sweet.
>

So far this makes sense, the terms readonly and readwrite simply refer to
access from a users standpoint

i.e. I create readonly volumes for system stuff that I
want to have consistant across machines (and not let users muck with). for

example if I want to add the latest and greatest copy of my favorite
window
manager and X, I could make a readonly volume for say /usr/X11 and call it

usr.X11, or should it be root.cell.usr.X11? then create a mount point at
say
/afs/cellname/usr.X11 and symlink it to /usr/X11. Then when I make changes

to /afs/cellname/usr/X11 I'd do a vos release? Is this correct?

Then for users, I create a r/w volume called home or users or whatever,
then mount
it at say /afs/cellname/home. Now do I create volumes for each user, then
mount them
at places like

/afs/cellname/home/user1
/afs/cellname/home/user2
...
then creating a symlink from /afs/cellname/home to /home on each machine?
Or can I
simply go into that volume and do a mkdir user1, user2 ...

I suppose if I am even in the right ball park I could just as easily make
the spot in AFS
space their home directory instead of /home/user1 etc.

so to recap (kind of) readonly for stuff like system binaries, and
read/write for
stuff like home directories. And the only things that nead to be
"released" are
read only volumes after I make a change to them. Is this right?

Thanx again for all the help.

Also, in case anyone cares, this is going to be for a Linux lab at the
school I work at
for use by students (less than 200 users total)


--
Corey Kovacs               "I know not with what weapons World War III
Computer Science Dept.      will be fought, but World War IV will be
DePauw University.          fought with sticks and stones."
765.658.4761                            - Albert Einstein