[OpenAFS] Several OpenAFS issues

[Christos Ricudis]

Dear OpenAFS users, 

Deploying OpenAFS on some systems I administer, I have ran into some
problems I'd like to discuss with the community : 

1) Documentation 

I cannot find any documentation on the AFSDB functionality and the dynroot
option on latest OpenAFS releases, short of some rather sparse notes on
release documentation. Are there more verbose explanations on these
subjects somewhere? 

2) Unlocking busy volumes

Once, I tried to backup my AFS volumes by taking a dump ("vos dump") and
backing up the resulting file. The resulting file was larger than 2GB, and
that crashed vos on my Linux AFS client, leaving the volume in busy
state. Is there any way to clear the busy state in this case, short of
restarting the AFS server? 

3) Incompatibilities with UNIX semantics

I am trying to put users' home directories on AFS. This works, generally,
except in the case of several programs that expect UNIX semantics to work
- for example, several programs insist on creating sockets or named pipes
inside the users' home directory instead of somewhere in /tmp. I understad
that there are no foreseeable solutions to this problem in the near
future, short of patching and informing software authors' about these
subjects, however I would like other people's comments and experiences
about using AFS for user home directories. 

4) KDE 2.2 on AFS

I suspect that this is related to 3). When a user, with his home
directory on AFS tries to start KDE, system locks hard - and I cannot find
any concise way of telling exactly where and why it hangs. I will try to
fetch more information about this, but have anybody encountered the same
problem? 

-- 
Christos Ricudis

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