[OpenAFS] Small suggestion for RH spec file? (keeping CellServDB up-to-date on *nix clients)

Ken Hornstein kenh@cmf.nrl.navy.mil
Mon, 30 Dec 2002 13:39:40 -0500


>Well, no. See that's the whole point of using a crontab process to 
>synchronise a local CellServDB.
>It's automagical robot-tastical.
>It just works.

You're assuming that the source of that file synced by cron is up-to-date.
Many times it is not.

It's been my experience that when I tell someone, "Hey, you can get this
file out of our AFS cell", about 50% of the time their CellServDB has
our old database server IP addresses ... the ones from 10 years ago.
In one case this even happened with someone who is now a regular OpenAFS
contributor.  In many cases the CellServDB that these sites used were
automatically synced up by cron ... but the source file was out of date,
and the admins who controlled it were too busy/lethargic to update it.

If I was the OpenAFS dictator, I don't think I would distribute a
CellServDB file _at all_, and simply tell sites that they should
publish AFSDB records if they want to make their cells globally
available.  But that's just me.

--Ken