[OpenAFS] Storing a CVS repository on AFS

[Emil Ochotta]

Hi All,

I'm new to AFS, so I'm looking primarily for advice / direction / tales
of woe.

Background:

I'm hoping to use AFS to improve read-times from a CVS repository.  We
currently have the repository set up at one location and access it
through a server via the CVS pserver (it's own TCP/IP client-server
stuff).

We have a bunch of sites worldwide all speaking directly to the one
server.

I'm hoping to set up additional servers at the remote locations to
improve local access times to the CVS data.

At first blush, it seems like the simplest solution (it terms of
changing what we do) would be to have the CVS repository data live in an
AFS directory and have all CVS servers access it with the same file
path.

So, all the CVS servers except one would be AFS clients. The CVS
repository data would be in the AFS cache of each CVS server.  A write
to one server would invalidate the cached copies of all CVS servers, but
read operations that hit the cache would be entirely local.

Questions:

1. Anyone out there tried something like this?  If so, what works or
doesn't?

2. Is there a concurrency race condition lurking in here?  CVS manages
concurrency by creating a lock directory.  Is this operation synchronous
on AFS such that a successful mkdir at any AFS client will guarantee no
other AFS client could create the same directory.

Thanks for reading this far.

-- Emil