[OpenAFS] State of OpenAFS

[Wout Mertens]

Hi,

I'm having a lot of trouble finding information on this subject, so I'll
just ask here:

Can anybody tell me what the current state is of AFS/OpenAFS/Arla/Coda?
More specifically, I would like to know about stability, performance,
snags versus NFS/Samba (only the advantages are posted everywhere ;) ),
and possibility of support.

I am in a sysadmin team maintaining a large-ish user base, with several
solaris servers worldwide serving maximum 600 solaris workstations per
server. We currently use NFS to serve up most applications and the home
directories. So I am wondering if it is feasible and/or smart to switch
over to OpenAFS. Our main motivations would be easy replication and volume
movement (home directories migrate with the users), coupled with high
reliability.

Basically, according to what the docs say, OpenAFS is ideal for us. Arla
was presumably started to have an open afs client, which is now not
necessary anymore, right? And Coda is x86 only as far as I can see.

So:
Stability: How stable is the server software? I hope at least as stable as
nfs :-)

Performance: The largest server is a E450 and in the very near future a
E6800. Serving nfs and mail for the 600 workstations bound on this one is
not a problem. Can I expect the same performance from OAFS?

Snags: I heard about problems with long running jobs/desktop sessions
having kerberos tickets timing out. Also, afs does write-on-close, does it
write-on-flush as well? What about logparsers running on one machine and
the logwriter on another (i.e. procmail)? Are these really problems?
Anything else that is different versus 'regular' unix filesystems?

Support: The few posts I could find all seemed to think that IBM/Transarc
had lousy support. Is there still any company interested in giving
support, or is it all 'if it doesn't work, fix it yourself'?
We have some really capable team members, so fixing stuff ourselves would
not really be much of a problem, but we'd have to be able to start off
with a stable base...

Thank you for any insights! I'll try summarizing what I get and putting it
on the AFSLore Wiki.

Wout.