[OpenAFS] Dear Transarc, I Quit! Love, Moose

[Esther Filderman]

For those of you who have laughed at me because my servers were not
running OpenAFS.


the short story, because I tend to babble: 

By the time IBM acknowledged the 2^30 problem, the PSC's AFS servers
were running OpenAFS 1.2.11, "upgraded" from Transarc 3.5.




the longer story:

Until today, the AFS servers at the PSC ran Transarc 3.5, patch
{mumble}.  I never put 3.6 on them, for some bizarre reason I can't
recall anymore.  For months, I've wanted to install OpenAFS on them,
but due to politics, couldn't do so without bringing up a "test cell"
to prove that it would all work easily.  I was supposed to get that
cell running over break, but got sick instead.

Being part of CMU, I get to talk online with folks at CMU and MIT
using zephyr, MIT's magical communication toy.  When I left the house
at 8:30am, some MIT folk were crowing about "Happy New Bit Day" and
the whole 2^30 thing.

When I got back to the house at 11 am, Jeff Hutzleman says:
     Hey, moose.. You want to upgrade your dbservers soon.
     I suggest a couple of hours ago.

First I tried patching and recompiling the Transarc 3.5 source.
Everyone who's ever done this, who is NOT an ex-ITC or -Transarc
employee, and has not bled from both eyes, please raise your hand.

By 2:30pm my servers were happily running OpenAFS 1.2.11.

We're still running a few IBM-AFS clients here and there, but now
we're almost completely an OpenAFS shop.




----------------------------------------------------------------
     ecf@psc.edu     Esther Filderman    moose+@cmu.edu 
            Senior System Mangler & AFS Dominatrix  
               Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center