[OpenAFS] Newbie questions

[Derek Atkins]

Brian Akins <bakins@web.turner.com> writes:

> Greetings,
> I'm an openAFS newbie.  I'm investigating a solution to provide
> read-only content to many clients (100's) and a read-only gold
> server(s). I have just begun to play with it and haven't found good
> answers to a few questions:
> 
> 1. Is the max volume size 8GB (this seems to be the case)?  Can a server
> serve many volumes, so that a fileserver serves 32 GB of data (for
> example)? Or is this a fileserver limit?

There really is not a max volume limit, except I would caution you to
keep volume size relatively small for replication and backup purposes.
There is no limit on the number of volumes a server can server.  I've
seen a fileserver with hundreds of gigabytes of storage, so no, there
is no "32GB limit" anywhere.

> 2. What happens to a client if it looses network connectivity to all
> servers (file, database)?  Can it still use the data in its local cache?

No.  It will eventually time out and the cache becomes invalid.  All
accesses to /afs will timeout.

> 3. Any tips on setting up "dataless" linux clients?

MIT does it; the MIT/Athena archicture is all about dataless clients.
When there is a problem, just re-install to a known configuration.
All user data is stored in AFS.  Do you have specific questions?

> We are inverstigating using Linux (Redhat 7.2 and Debian 3.0).  If this
> goes well, we will continue with Solaris 8 & 9.

I would advise against 7.2 -- at least use 7.3.  RH7.3 was released in
April '02 (vs. December '01), and has a lot of patches that don't
exist for 7.2.  FWIW, MIT uses 7.3 and Solaris 8, and is in the
process of upgrading to Red Hat 9 and Solaris 9.

> Thanks.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord@MIT.EDU                        PGP key available