[OpenAFS] replica server not "failing over" ?

[John Koyle]

On Thu, 2004-02-26 at 02:12, Tino Schwarze wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 05:33:00PM -0600, James Schmidt wrote:
> 
> > I've got my two openafs servers, afs1 and afs2.  Afs1 is the primary.
> > I've created RO volume replicas on AFS2, and 'vos listvldb' shows the
> > correct info, however if I offline afs1, all of the clients time out
> > (including AFS2, which is also a client).
> 
> > On The Client:
> > [root@www2 /]# cd /afs
> > [root@www2 afs]# ls -al
> > drwxrwxrwx    2 root     root         2048 Feb 25 14:55 .mydomain.com
> > drwxrwxrwx    2 root     root         2048 Feb 25 14:55 mydomain.com
> > [root@www2 afs]# cd mydomain.com/       <--- this should be the replicated RO volume, correct?
> 
> What does "fs lsmount mydomain.com" say?
> 
> > I know that since the secondary AFS server, AFS2, should have a copy
> > of the RO volume, I should still be able to CD into this directory and
> > read files, correct?

I had this same problem recently and wondered what the problem was. 
Digging through the AFS Administrators Guide I found this statement:

"If you are replicating any volumes, you must replicate the root.afs and
root.cell volumes, preferably at two or three sites each (even if your
cell only has two or three file server machines). The Cache Manager
needs to pass through the directories corresponding to the root.afs and
root.cell volumes as it interprets any pathname. The unavailability of
these volumes makes all other volumes unavailable too, even if the file
server machines storing the other volumes are still functioning."

Following these instructions, I did a vos addsite root.afs and root.cell
to my second server, then vos release root.afs root.cell and fs checkv.

Now when I cd /afs and do fs whereis mydomain.com both servers show up. 
John