[OpenAFS] Timeouts, Client-Configuration & AFS-Filespace on Client-PCs

[Nickolai Zeldovich]

> 1. When one of my fileservers is down and I try to access a volume
>    on it ("ls -l"ing a directory with a mountpoint to that volume)
>    ls waits and shows something like "ls : 'volume': connection timed out".
>    Is it possible to reduce that timeout till that message is
>    shown? 5 seconds would be very good...

If you build AFS from source, you can change the timeout period;
it's AFS_RXDEADTIME in src/afs/afs.h, and defaults to 50 seconds.
Perhaps it would be clever to make this a runtime-tunable value,
using something like sysctl on Linux..

Another solution is to use fakestat: it's an experimental feature
in the development versions, which basically makes 'ls -ld dirname'
avoid talking to the fileserver which holds dirname, if dirname is
a mountpoint for some volume.  It works quite well on Solaris, and
probably works on Linux too.  You might encounter more than the
usual number of bugs in the development versions, though.

-- kolya