[OpenAFS] Transitioning from IBM Transarc to OpenAFS Help

[John Hascall]

> Greetings OpenAFS Community,
> 
> We are *finally* going to transition our production AFS cells from IBM 
> Transarc to the OpenAFS code base. I have lots of questions ...

We chose to do the rolling upgrade.
We were pretty much forced to switch all our AFS-DB servers
to OpenAFS when the 1.2.10/11 time bug happened.  Since then
we have been adding new commodity file-servers with OpenAFS
and rotating out the old IBM/SUN and Transarc/DEC file servers.

This is actually been pretty painless (since that first panic-stricken
night).  We bring in a new server and we move our (technical) group's
volumes there first and then if all seems good we start moving others
to the new server.  The users never know anything has happened.

If you feel nervous, I'd setup a small test cell and practice,
but I think big danger lurks in #2 (do you know all the places
that your cellname or /afs/yourcellname is buried?)

The hardest part is getting the clients updated (since they largely
aren't under our direct management we have to beg, cajole, and wheedle :)


John

> 1) The communications-type folks, you know, the ones who don't actually 
> do any of the work, want to keep the same cell name and just do a 
> one-time massive integration come cut-over day.  They hope to mix and 
> match IBM servers (database and fileservers) and OpenAFS servers (ie: 
> just added OpenAFS servers and rotate the IBM ones out).  To me, this 
> just screams of database corruption and problems; the technical side of 
> our house is really against this (we have enough problems with running 
> on one code-base) for various reasons, but it would be quickest way.  
> Before I go testing this for weeks on end, does this community have any 
> opinions on it.
> 
> 2) The technical-type folks here want to start over with a new cell name 
> so we can slowly transition our production clients over one at a time, 
> have the old cell running for easy cut-back, take the time in the new 
> cell to design the layout and permission scheme the correct way (like no 
> individuals on ACLs, etc.), etc.
> 
> This is slower but safer and easier in my opinion.  We have lots to do, 
> like transitioning from the afs4-krb database and K5, moving to newer 
> hardware, etc.
> 
> I'd really like some feedback, either in the appropriate forum or 
> personally, on experiences or thoughts.  There isn't a lot publicly out 
> there on a big transition like this.
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> John Harris
> University of California, Davis
> 
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