[OpenAFS] Evaluating AFS for in house use, RFCs...

[David Bear]

On Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 12:51:22PM -0500, Jeffrey Altman wrote:

many parts of the thread cut, however the following grabbed my
attention:

> 
> I run Microsoft Office 2003 out of AFS.  I would never consider doing
> that over SMB.  I had experience in a prior company of running
> applications off of a Windows 2000 Server via SMB.   There was nothing
> but complaints from users.   The SMB client does not cache and unless
> you marked all of the EXE and DLL files so that Windows would copy
> them entirely into the paging file, the constant re-reading of the
> binary data from the file server made the use of the application
> unbearable.  With AFS this is not a problem.

this is exactly what I would like to do. However, there are a couple
of problems.

Assume there are 3 clients all running msoffice out of afs.
1) user Tom has write acl's to the afs space containing the office
application. He does the initial install. However, there is an ip
based acl so that all 3 clients have rl permissions.
2) how does user Jane install office such that she only gets all the
registry information but does not modify the executables that live in
afs?
3) user Tom is diligent about apply office fixpacks and therefore the
executable that live in afs are the latest and greatest. But how does
Tom manage to push out the registry edits that microsoft loves to
tweak when doing updates as well?
4) User Clark also uses applications out of afs. Most of these are
simple exe's with dll's that live in the same location in afs. To make
like easy, he just added /afs/realm.com/bin to his PATH environment.
However, this seems to have slowed is windows machine down -- possibly
because windows searches in afs for a lot more than it needs to. How
does Clark optimize the 'easy' launching of exe's that live in afs.

I realize this is a whole new discussion thread, but from mail
exchanges I've had in the past, this is where AFS really shines for
some company that I won't name that deals with securities.


> 
> However, I go back to the earlier comment about the usage model.
> If what you are doing is generating lots of data to write into file
> system for archival storage, then the cache manager does not help
> you and the default AFS chunk size will hurt as well.   The block
> size determines how much data is written per StoreData RPC.  The default
> chunk size for the Windows client in 1.2 and in IBM AFS was 4K.  In 1.4
> it is now 128K.  However, if you are doing a lot of writing of large
> quantities of data you will want to increase this to something much
> larger.  The max chunk size is 1024MB.  You can set the default chunk
> size as part of a transform you apply to the OpenAFS for Windows MSI.
> 
> Jeffrey Altman
> 
> 
> 



-- 
David Bear
phone: 	480-965-8257
fax: 	480-965-9189
College of Public Programs/ASU
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 "Beware the IP portfolio, everyone will be suspect of trespassing"