[OpenAFS] MacOSX Finder exacerbates even minor problems with network filesystems

[Adam Megacz]

Jeffrey Altman <jaltman@secure-endpoints.com> writes:
> What were you going to do with a private build that was hacked to
> set the Hard Dead Timeout value to 5 seconds instead of 120 seconds?
> Were you going to give it to the faculty member to install on her/his
> machine?  In my opinion that would have been a disaster since the
> reliability of the client would have gone down the tubes and the user
> would have completely given up.

The real problem is that -- because of the way the Finder works -- the
AFS client was severely crippling his machine even when he wasn't
trying to use AFS.  If it had simply been a matter of AFS not working,
that would have been a minor inconvenience.  But from his perspective,
he installed this strange software he's never heard of, and all of a
sudden he couldn't do things he was doing before.  Really bad.

Yeah, if it had just been a matter of "I can't access stuff in /afs",
I would have been more patient.  I've been through the server-log
drill before, it's no sweat.

I take pains to mention that, at the end of the day, I fault Apple's
Finder design for allowing unresponsive network filesystems to cause
so much trouble for people trying to do non-network-filesystem-related
work.  I consider it more or less a miracle that there's a MacOS AFS
client at all, and I'm grateful for that.

  - a

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