[OpenAFS] installation advice needed

[Atle Veka]

Hey all,

I have been going through the openafs docs the past couple of days as I am
hoping it will enable us to streamline our setup. So, before I dig deeper
into the system I'd like to see if anyone on the list uses openafs in a
similar manner or if it is simply not recommended.

Let me explain our setup briefly; We have 17 load balanced FreeBSD servers
in the cluster. 5 of those backend servers do ~20 requests per second (PHP
- each hit has the potential of accessing multiple files, anywhere from
1-10) while the other 12 do ~120 requests per second (graphics - ~5000
B/request) at peak. Each individual backend server has an identical set of
content/data distributed via rsync.

Now, if openafs would be able to serve this cluster with say 2-3
replicated content machines, that would make me very happy!

Some questions:
1) While FreeBSD (4.10-RELEASE) is required in the cluster, Linux would be
OK to use for the openafs server. What is the recommended OS as far as the
server goes?

2) Am I right in reading that openafs does its own traffic distribution?
In other words, we would not need a separate load balancer for the openafs
servers?

Comments, configuration tricks, etc, are greatly appreciated. :)


Thanks!

Atle
-
Flying Crocodile Inc, Unix Systems Administrator