[OpenAFS] Several OpenAFS issues

[Derrick J Brashear]

On Sat, 20 Oct 2001, Christos Ricudis wrote:

> 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? 

Not yet.

> 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? 

Derek made a suggestion but understand that in the worst case scenario you
can kill the volserver in question manually if you need faster turnaround
in the case he describes a wait, and not the fileserver or the whole
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. 

Carnegie Mellon has been using AFS home directories for longer than I've
been there as either staff or student; The number of programs which
actually need to be patched has been comparatively small.

> 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? 

Is there some directory browser trying to traverse /afs from the top and
stat()ing everything in /afs? e.g. is the machine really locked or does it
just appear so to the user while all the inaccessible cells in /afs time
out? If you wish to test this theory, create a volume with just a mount
point named after your cell for root.cell, and invoke afsd on a test
machine as
/usr/vice/etc/afsd -rootvol (the name of the volume you created above)
after loading the kernel module, then try KDE. Yes, I hate directory
browsing software which decides to do me a favor and randomly enumerate
directories on my machine.

-D