[OpenAFS] Read-only issues

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 1:16 PM -0500 11/1/04, Derek Harkness wrote:
>Correct I'm replicating my home volumes.

If you're going to replicate home volumes, then you have to point
the entry in /etc/passwd (or equivalent) to the rw volume.  This
doesn't seem worth the trouble to me.

>But if that isn't possible or not recommended then AFS is really
>quite useless for user home directories.

RPI has put about 8,000 to 10,000 home directories (per year) in
AFS space for about fourteen years now.  Works fine for us.  We
don't see as much use in that AFS space now that every student
(here at RPI) owns a laptop with at least 20 gig of disk space,
but people do still use their AFS space.

>The whole [reason] we're moving to AFS was to offer fully
>redundant home space, if a server crashed the rw volumes on
>would go off-line and the users would switch to the read-only
>allowing them to at least read the files.

The actual home directory pretty much has to be a rw volume, or
you will drive your users crazy.  We do take advantage of AFS
backup volumes for home directories here at RPI, and provides a
very useful service to our users.

Some users have additional volumes (in addition to their home
directory), and some of those are replicated.  That can work
well for some special set of files, but it will not work well
for an entire home directory.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@rpi.edu