[OpenAFS] Newbie questions

[Brian Akins]

On Thu, 2003-07-03 at 17:47, Derek Atkins wrote:
> 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.

Can you define "eventually?"  What I want to guard against is that a
network blip isolates a group of clients for 5 minutes or so.  Is this
timeout configurable?  Anyone have experience tinkering with this?


> 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?


These "clients" would really be web servers, so they would be single
purpose, so to speak.  Any links available explicitly using linux and
openAFS is a "dataless" design. google didn't turn up much.


> > 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.

Our linux installs are merely based on 7.2.  We have our own kernel and
various other components...

Thanks for the time.

-- 
Brian Akins <bakins@web.turner.com>
CNN Internet Technologies