[OpenAFS] Several OpenAFS issues

[Russ Allbery]

Christos Ricudis <ricudis@paiko.gr> writes:

> 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?

vos unlock will release any actual locks.  The volume may still be busy;
if so, that will time out in a little while (something like five or ten
minutes, I believe).

> 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.

We've been using AFS home directories for users here at Stanford for
nearly a decade, and it works great.  Very, very few programs really need
to create special files, and the ones that do we either don't install and
don't support or patch to use a better directory.  It means that one can't
use some slightly more secure configurations at times, like configuring
screen to put sockets in the user home directory rather than in /tmp, but
generally it doesn't cause many problems.

I run into the lack of support for hard links across directories a lot
more than I encounter this one.

> 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?

I've not seen it; I know we've had users using KDE in the past under Red
Hat 7.0 with AFS home directories and not encountering any problems.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>