[OpenAFS] Roadmap for features

[Mike Burns]

On Mon, 8 Nov 2004, Horst Birthelmer wrote:

>
> On Nov 8, 2004, at 2:50 PM, Mike Burns wrote:
>
> >
> > - Volume names longer than 22/31 characters.
> >
>
> Is this a "must have" or just a "want to"... ???
>

This is a "want to".  We have several hundred filesets with over 31
character names.  We would have to get creative with naming some of the
volumes.

> > - Faster fileserver process start up and stop times.  This has improved
> > greatly from when we used to use AFS, but can still be slow for large
> > number of volumes on a server.  At some point after 10K-40K volumes
> > are on
> > a (Solaris 9) server start/stop times can jump from less than 30
> > seconds
> > to a handful of minutes and even 10-20 minutes.  We'll have a minimum
> > of
> > 160K volumes.  We probably have enough file servers now to stay around
> > 10K volumes per server, but if we decide to use .backup volumes that
> > number will double and we may hit the performance inflection point.
>
> In your tests, did you use the --fastrestart switch on configure??
>

No I did not.  I think that when reading the description of what the fast
restart option did, it implied I would have to pay more attention to
restarts and manually running the salvager when it was needed rather than
having it run automatically.

> >
> > - Incremental file level backups.  I haven't looked into this with
> > OpenAFS.  We've always used IBM's TSM which supported backing
> > up/restoring
> > ACLs for files and directories with DFS and AFS.  Do any backup
> > products
> > support this for OpenAFS or would we have to back up an entire volume
> > at a
> > time?
> >
>
> That depends on what you want to backup and when. I think we don't have
> the resources to compete with TSM.
> Do we actually want to??
>
> You cannot do a filelevel incremental backup when your atomic units of
> the system are volumes unless you use AFS as a normal filesystem and
> backup it like any other filesystem by use of the client. Maybe
> somebody comes up with a clever idea on this one. You can backup your
> partition for example from the fileserver or something like that.
>

I found a couple of references since sending this email.  A product called
TiBS and someone who had written a taracl program that saves the ACLs.

> Horst
>
>

- Mike

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mike Burns                                     Emerging Technologies Group
burns@psu.edu                  Academic Services and Emerging Technologies
+1 814 863 5606                          The Pennsylvania State University