[OpenAFS] Two questions AFS as a *large* webserver system backend in lieu of NFS

[Derrick J Brashear]

On Fri, 25 Jul 2003, Michael Loftis wrote:

> Someone mentioned privately AFS can't/won't handle device nodes?  Is this
> (still) true?  If so, why, and how difficult would it be to develop this
> feature?  Without it almost all the utility of AFS is lost to me.  I need
> to have user jails, with a 'shared' part that doesn't change (you know
> /usr/bin/usr/sbin) replicated to everyone without having to keep 300MB per
> user (actually almost 3x that I think).

It would probably be easy to do, but they're not portable. Likewise the
developed solution probably couldn't be backward compatible, but that's
not (necessarily) a big deal.

The non-portability is a big deal, since you could end up scribbling on
your disk, for instance.

Actually, in the ideal case a solution could be done using sysname ids,
only serve the device nodes to a client with the right (same as that
created them) sysname id. Even this is no guarantee, because for instance
Solaris may use different ones depending on how you installed the system.