[OpenAFS] AFS suitability for hosting..

[Derrick J Brashear]

On Thu, 1 Jul 2004, Rob wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I've been thinking of using AFS for a (existing) hosting system but
> not sure if its really suitable..
>
> First - can servers running afs server and client along with apache
> (on linux) handle high traffic? Does afs use a lot of resources
> (cpu/memory) in such a case?

how high traffic? how much of the traffic is the same data set?

> Second - currently the users do not actually have system accounts at
> all - authentication including ftp is handled through a mysql db..  as
> the users do not have 'real' accounts I don't want to create afs
> accounts for them all either.. just directories on the afs 'disk'
> which will then be handled in the same way as we do now.  Can I create
> volumes that are writable by all ftp users, assuming they already
> authenticated through my current db and the ftp server restricts them
> to their home directories, without authenticating again through afs?

either by authenticating the ftpd itself to afs and then enforcing access 
control as you do now (and Carnegie Mellon does this for its web 
publishing system) or by using an IP based ACL allowing the ftpd to write. 
I recommend the former.

> Final question (for now ;)) - from what I can make out from the docs,
> replication is based on volumes and when a single file is changed or a
> new file is uploaded in a volume then the entire volume has to be
> replicated each time rather than just replicating that file - is that
> true?

no.
unless you vos release -f only what's changed gets pushed.