[OpenAFS] afsclient with dynroot? - root.othercells solution

[Paul Blackburn]

Hi Daniel,

My solution, which I call "root.othercells",  is to mount
all the "foreign" AFS cells in /afs/.../ (volume: root.othercells)
and then have symbolic links from:

    /afs/$other_cell => /afs/.../$other_cell

How does this help?

When you do a "ls /afs", instead of contacting every other
mounted AFS cell, you are just listing a directory of symbolic links.

This results in a much faster "ls /afs" than if you mount
the remote cells at the documented mountpoint in /afs
(volume: root.afs).

Does this "break anything" ?

No, because when you "cd /afs/$other_cell" you follow
link to the mountpoint in /afs/.../$other_cell/.

The only issue you do need to be aware of is that you
have the root.othercells volume mounted at /afs/.../.
So, if you do a "global traversal" (eg a find /afs/ $options )
you would traverse the remote cells both in /afs/ and /afs/.../.
It's trivial to exclude the /afs/.../ from such "find"s.

We have been using this for a few years now and it
makes a huge difference.

For example, with Windows AFS client, you can use
the "file explorer" or browse the filesystem starting at
(the equivalent of) /afs and have results in a reasonable time.

Like any other AFS volume, you can replicate
the root.othercells volume onto several fileservers.

I hope this helps.
--
cheers
paul                              http://acm.org/~mpb

 

Daniel Swärd wrote:

>I've configured my clients with dynroot (which I'm not sure is the right
>way to go about things), and I have this problem with the terminal
>getting locked when doing a "ls /afs".
>
>I know you know there is a way to deal with this, so what should I do?
>(that is, I want to get the listing without the client trying to contact
>every server around the globe...).
>
>:)
>
>	/Daniel, I should know this right?
>
>
>
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